How to simply make the light of car headlights brighter.
Increasing the brightness of the headlights. The maximum from the regular halogen.
This article will not talk about “cool” bulbs and lenses, but about how you can make headlights brighter with regular bulbs. The method of reducing the voltage drop on the lamps themselves. In my car with the onboard voltage is fine, the glass and reflectors on the headlights are also in good condition and light seems to be enough too. But it is still possible to improve.
In order to understand how much the voltage sags on the lamps, you need to connect the tester probes to the lamp and turn on the dipped beam. As you can see in the photo below, the right headlamp voltage of 12.6 volts and the battery 13.8 volts, so the drop is 1.2 volts and the left lamp voltage of 0.9 volts.
This drop occurs because the power to the lamps comes from the wiring box in the cabin, through relays and fuses. It affects the cross section of the wire and its length. Each headlight has a ground contact on the car body. Let’s begin by cleaning these contacts (see photo below).
I cleaned the contacts, lubricated them with conductive grease, and screwed them back on:
Re-measured the voltage drop, but nothing changed, so the ground contact was good. The fuse box is also fine, and it is in the passenger compartment. Now it remains to increase the cross section of the wire and reduce its length. You can read about the influence of wire length and cross-section on the voltage drop here. You need to do this so you don’t have to make any changes to the original wiring and you can return everything back to the original look when selling the car. For this you need to make two adapters with relays and pads, buying parts (see photo below), as well as wires cross section of 1.5 mm * 2, better 2.5 mm * 2 only they are more difficult to attach to the terminals in the relay.
Ready set for one headlight (see photo below). You can buy similar kits from our Chinese friends, they have been selling such adapters for a long time.
Now let’s test this adapter on the car. Relay control and high beam will work by standard wiring. In the regular connector at the headlight plug insert the plug, and the connector adapter to the bulb. Power wires put on the battery. As you can see in the photo below, the drop was 0.35 volts. This is already excellent.
For the sake of experiment, I will set the luxmeter on the wall in front of the car and measure the change in brightness of the light depending on the voltage (see photo below):
All measurements in one photo:
As a result, we can see that the brightness of the headlights changes noticeably even with a change of 1 volt. At 12.5 volts the instrument showed 4720 lux, and at 13.5 volts already 5930 lux, i.e. brighter by about 25%. This is equivalent to buying a more expensive lamp, which will be written supposedly +25% brightness, but whether they are there, you can find out only with the device.
To summarize. Pros: If you have a voltage drop of about 1 volt or more on the bulbs, this method will noticeably increase the brightness of the light. The mounting block will be unloaded and the voltage there will also increase. Minus: Since the voltage of the bulbs has increased, they will also burn out more often. To prolong the life of the lamps, you can complicate the device adapters by adding soft switching circuits, which I also implemented, placing them in the same box with a relay (see photo below). I tested these adapters with soft starters for about half a year with old lamps, hoping they would burn out, but they did. Now I’ve put in new standard not expensive bulbs, and I put the old ones away for backup. If a relay or circuit fails, everything can easily be restored to normal.
What do I do if the headlight bulbs don’t shine well?
In fact, technically, the brightness of the lights is not important. The headlights just have to be working to meet the main requirement. But, one way or another, most responsible drivers think about how to maintain a good light in their headlights without any problems. The whole point is that dimly lit headlights at night can be a serious problem that will not be so easy to solve. For example, bad daytime headlights at night can lead to an accident situation.
Causes of bad light. As practice shows, there are several causes of poor daytime headlight light, which are: damaged contacts, clogged or damaged plafond, faulty or old bulb, cloudy glass, as well as improper lighting adjustment.
By identifying the exact cause of the dim light, you can try to eliminate it and it will normalize the operation of the car, eliminating the likelihood of trouble in the future. Drivers need to regularly monitor the light of the headlights in the car, as this will really avoid the problem.
If one headlight burns brighter than the other, then it is in its device that you need to look for faults. Now that we have figured out the possible causes of why the headlights are dim, it’s time to talk about how to make the headlights shine brighter.
Contacts are damaged . When a headlight has damaged contacts that are coming off or contacts that can’t work interconnectively, this leads to lighting problems.
Voltage. Additionally, drivers need to check the voltage level, which allows them to maintain optimum headlighting throughout the operation of the vehicle. If the voltage level is insufficient, you need to solve the problem by paying attention to this very nuance.
Plafond . Drivers who are not satisfied with the light of the headlights should think about the cleanliness of the plafond. Very often bad headlights are emitted because of a dirty plafond, as well as its possible clouding, which occurs over time. The cleanliness of the plafond can be restored through the use of appropriate products and cleaning the element yourself.
Bulb. Sometimes it is so obvious the reason why the headlights shine badly that there is very little to do. It is worth remembering: if the light at home burns badly, the first thing we do is to check the bulb installed in the lamp. The same logic should be the same for the motorist, faced with poor performance of the lights in the car.
Polishing . The cloudy glass can be polished so that the light of the headlights is good enough again and allows you to operate your car safely without any problems. Polishing can be done by yourself or by contacting a professional who will be willing to help with the process.
Adjustment . Sometimes problems with the light arise due to improper adjustment of the headlights. If the near and far lighting modes of the machine are combined, then you can check and adjust only the far one. The high beam will independently adjust to the new parameters. Only the adjustment of fog lights differs from the above method.
Conclusion. As a rule, each driver is able to figure out on his own what exactly happened to the headlights. If the identified problem is not amenable to elimination, then you can go to a service center to solve the trouble and eliminate the consequences. In rare cases it is possible to cope with the problem only by completely replacing the headlights with new ones.
