Upgrading Your Headlights
Have you noticed the newer the vehicle the brighter the headlights? It doesn’t stop there, pun intended, as the brake light burn your retinas much like the Kenny Roger’s chicken sign did on “Seinfeld”. Keeping up with the new vehicles may not be a good enough reason to upgrade your headlights. Most of the time, for city dwellers, the ambient light is almost enough to drive by safely. The headlight serve as more of a warning for those people from pulling out in front of you. But out on country roads, or doing bad weather, especially weather that causing massive power outage, bright headlights are a blessing to you, the pilot in command!
The great news is that upgraded headlights are cheap to buy and easy to install. Light Emitting Diode (LED) have risen in brightness, and dropped in price. They give a clean sharp light that doesn’t generate excessive heat, or emit light in 360 degrees. This allows them to be brighter, cooler, and more power efficient. Basically you get a lot more light for less power! **NOTE If you live in areas of ice and snow LED lights may need an addition of a headlight heater to keep the light from being blocked. This means in almost all cases your stock headlight wiring will be just fine for this upgrade. Verify this with the LED light instructions prior to install.
My wife drives a 2003 Jeep Wrangler “TJ”. The headlights in these Jeeps were horrible. Upgrading the wiring harness would improve the light output, as well as some of the incandescent headlight replacements you could buy five years ago. It was better, but still bad. There are aftermarket businesses selling headlights in the hundreds of dollars. I don’t know maybe I’m just too cheap, but I’m not spending $250+ for a set of headlights. I’ve learning that “cheap” LED lights from eBay are amazingly bright and amazingly cheap. I learned to look for CREE LEDs.
With this knowledge I started searching Amazon for a good 7″ LED headlight for my wife’s TJ. I found “Xprite 7″ Inch 75W CREE LED Headlights” At the time of this posting they are $95.99 and free shipping if you are Prime member. They come with anti-flicker adapters for you JK owners, and may also work on JL and JT. If you have a TJ you won’t need the adapters. If you’ve never changed out a headlight, I’ll leave it up to friends, family, and YouTube videos to step you through the process. Believe me once you’ve done this you’ll know it’s a very easy job, however with a 50,000 hour lifespan chances are you’ll never change a headlight again, at least not on this vehicle.
My wife was VERY pleased with this headlight upgrade and can see so much better. Now she will switch on the 7″ floods that I added to her custom bumper but honestly I think that’s just because she’s in a very dark area and gets nervous about being alone in the dark. 😀
In this picture, (above) you see the Xprite 7″ LED lights, two no name 7″ rectangular CREE LED lights, and the “fog” lights, aren’t. They are two KC 100 watt Daylighter off road lights. You old timers will remember when the KC Daylighters were the stuff to have on your Jeep!
These headlights come with running lights. You will need to find a switched 12 volt source. Switched meaning power comes on when the ignition key is in the run position, and off when the ignition key is off. These daytime running lights are a great safety feature, but not required to be connected for the headlights to function normally.
The Jeep Talk Show highly recommends this upgrade, oh and be sure to take the extra time to adjust these much brighter lights so they light the road and not the oncoming drivers. These headlights ARE DOT approved, and if you’ve done all you can to install properly, adjust the aiming as to not blind other drivers and they still flash their lights at you…
