Option 2: Housing Removal
Another option for replacing the door lights is to pull out the little housing. To start, I removed the arm rest, it just pulls up from the handle side. For location reference, this is the rear left door. These are old pics I have from the lock actuator replacement, but its all the same for every door.
The door light housing I'm removing is actually the rear passenger side, but the above pics are the rear driver side. I hope that's not too disorienting. I started removing the rearward plastic tab through the larger tab, I just pushed it out with a screwdriver.
The frontward tab is metal and I pushed this through second, again just used a long screwdriver to get it through.
Once it comes through, there's a little power cable for the light, that just comes out after pushing a retention tab. Then pop the diffuser and replace the bulb as normal
Current Measurements |
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I'm taking an electrical theory class in school, and now have a better multimeter for doing all sorts of fun activities. I decided for fun, I was going to measure the current draw of the old filament bulbs vs the new led bulbs.
Map / Door Lights
Since the map lights and door lights use the same bulbs, I only measured the current on the door lights and dome lights.
The setup was alligator clips into the contacts in the housing, to the bulb. For current measurements, the multimeter goes in series, so I had it between the end of the alligator clip and the other lead on the bulb
Excuse my apparently backwards leads. The old filament bulbs drew about 0.235 A = 235 mA, whereas the LED bulbs drew 0.047 A = 47 mA
Dome Lights
Same deal with the dome lights, alligator clips to the socket with the multimeter in series. The dome light was a tad too big for my alligator clips to get around the ends, so it was a bit difficult to just pinch them on there.
The old filament bulbs drew around 0.580 A = 580 mA, whereas the LED bulbs drew 0.128 A = 128 mA.
After Pictures |
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I took some before pictures, but they ended up having the aperture/white balance/brightness off, because they make the old filament bulbs look super bright, when in fact, they were kinda dim. Here are the after pictures, they're much brighter than before! Now I probably need to get around to the map light mod, since I like how bright it is when entering at night with the map lights on.