Retrofitting H3 housings to HID

[grokglock]

Has anyone here successfully retrofitted a standard H3 bulb housing to run 100w HID bulbs? I saw a guy do it on youtube and the results where rather impressive for the investment.

Reasons to do this? Possibly a good cost to performance ratio.

Here is the link I found:
YouTube

I haven't seen much more about this. My primary concern would be that those housings would get too hot and melt/burn.

 

[rightyouareken]

PLEASE don't do this unless you're only gonna use the truck offroad. Halogen housings are going to scatter light in a bad way with HID bulbs. You will be blinding other drivers. Only do this if you intend to do a proper retrofit with an HID projector installed into the housing to provide real light cutoff control.

 

[grokglock]

PLEASE don't do this unless you're only gonna use the truck offroad. Halogen housings are going to scatter light in a bad way with HID bulbs. You will be blinding other drivers. Only do this if you intend to do a proper retrofit with an HID projector installed into the housing to provide real light cutoff control.

I should have stated that in the original post. Yes this is intended exclusively and purposefully FOR OFF ROAD USE ONLY. In fact in many states this would be considered ILLEGAL ON ROAD.

So with that out of the way proceed at your discretion and at your own risk. That being said, spill might be beneficial even desired offroad for more of a flooding effect. I am not a light engineer and don't know much about them other than this is a possibly cheap alternative for powerful offroad use.

Does anyone one on here have anything? write-ups, tests, anything? Let's see some pictures. 7" H3 housings are like $9, ballasts and bulbs are like $50, throw in some wire, relay, and switch and you can be all in for less than $100? maybe less than $90

 

[rightyouareken]

Glad to hear it's not for onroad

Is there a specific reason you're interested in this approach as opposed to some LED lights or a lightbar? Myself, personally, find LEDs to be a cleaner, more robust approach than HIDs.

 

[grokglock]

I'm a tinkerer. The video I linked was pretty impressive in my opinion, the results he got were very interesting. I like the look of old school daylighters more than the LED bars. Thinking of something powerful I could mount on the front bumper without spending a fortune on Hellas

 

[rightyouareken]

Sounds like a fun project. I'll be interested in seeing your results if you decide to do it. Hopefully some others here have played around with high powered HIDs and can help. Most Ive done is a more OEM style retrofit using 35w bulbs/ballasts with FXR bixenon projectors on my BMW.

 

[Ed_C]

I've done 75-100w on the OEM foglights. The housings are actually pretty robust, but they're foglights, not driving lights, so they have their limitations optics-wise.

I haven't measured actual wattage at the bulb, but power draw was pretty high when I tested a pair of Chinese-made ballasts claimed to be 75w. Even if these were say only around 70% efficient (from what I've read OEM HID ballasts are close to 90% efficiency) these ballasts outputted well over 100w.

Would I use them in a headlight with a projector retrofit? Absolutely not. For an offroad / auxiliary high beam lamp perhaps, but definitely not on those lights that YouTube guy used.