I ran my halos off of the running lights and both of the boards powering the halos fried. Is that on me, or do you think it was a defect?
IN an earlier post, I recall you said you had the halos tied into the parking lights not the DRL's? I'm a little confused of how you have/had them wired up.
I've ran both CCFL's and LED halos off of the parking lights several times and I've never had an issue. Your still better off with a stand-alone relay and trigger but...
I understand what relays do, but how would you wire it up and what relay would you use? I need to figure out why my halos are pulling so much amperage that the are frying the fuses and boards.
I ran my lights once or twice before disabling the DRLs... Think I hurt anything? I thought it just shortened the life expectancy if you didn't disable the DRL circuit.
You
should be ok but I can't make any promises. The problem is that our trucks dont have a separate bulb from the factory for the DRL. The factory wiring sends a reduced amount of current to the factory halogen bulbs. The DRL's therefore are the headlights, operating with reduced power, emitting a dimmed version of the headlight output. Now when you install HID ballasts into this equation your factory DRL circuit is still trying to do the same thing. They are sending a reduced amount of current to your ballasts to try and run the headlights at a reduced output level. The problem here is that the HID's require a large sum of power to fire initially. Once they are "ignited" the power supply needed to run them is less. Think of the ballasts like a capacitor. So now your ballasts are trying to get all the power they can to ignite the bulbs but your DRL circuit is sending them a reduced amount. Bad for the ballasts and it WILL reduce the life expectancy of them. If you only did it a couple times, hopefully it won't affect the ballasts drastically.
Go buy a basic relay from your local auto everything store.
They are very simple.
Source Power lead - connect directly to battery
+ Voltage trigger lead - connect this to parking lights, in parallel eg split connection (think of this as amp power on lead if you know about car audio)
Halo power lead (+)
Relay Ground - connect to ground eg chassis
BTW, perhaps you keep blowing fuses because the halos have bad electronics. You already said one of them looked bad. You are describing the symptoms of a simple electrical short.
This is pretty much like tapping straight into the parking light circuit. Your relay in the above scenario would be triggered by the parking light activation thus turning on your halos. I'd rather just splice into the parking light circuit and save yourself the trouble if your running the LED halos.
Optimal for the OP would be to get a relay as mentioned above:
- connect relay source power to the battery (+)
- ground the relay (-)
- halo power lead (+)
- voltage trigger lead (+): have to do your homework here. Find which wire in your DRL module is the power wire for the headlights. Connect your new relay voltage trigger lead to this wire.
I
think that would allow your new relay to trigger when the DRL's would normally turn on. Instead of your headlights now being the DRL, your halos would take over that function. I've yet to dig into the wiring of the factory DRL system but it's something I need to do so I could be incorrect but it makes sense. Although, I'm no electrician either.... haha
GL!
