I just need to know if 2 of these are enough to illuminate a plate bright enough so I won't get pulled over. Thanks.
i have two in the top corners,it lights up the corners bright the lower not so,depends on the cop,better than no light,,
I love the warm light of incandescent lights. I just cant get behind the harshness of LEDs... Sorry, I really was not much help!
definitely depends on the cop, and I would assume the units themselves. I bought some on ebay that look just like the ones posted for an old bike of mine, and they were pretty pitiful. oznium.com has some quality led's. i've used their 9 led strips as interior lights before and been very happy with them. their other stuff is nice as well, but don't know if they make bolt led's
use them they work great,its hard for most cops to site you because most laws were written before LEDS were invented and the standards are compltely different go for it,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
According to what I've read, there really isn't a white led. a blue and yellow led are paired and the eye interprets it as white light.
I guess its the thought counts, those are better than nothing. Alot of cop cars around here have plate scanners so your info pops up on their computer regardless if they can see the plate or not. Having those is one less reason to pull you over.
I run 2 in the lower corners of the plate. The light did not flow all the way across my plate, so I spaced them out with some stainless upholstery washers. Looks good, and the light hits the entire plate now. sorry I looked in my photos, but I do not have one that shows them well.
LEDs' light is directional and doesn't have the spread of a common incandescent auto bulb. That is the "problem" here. They should be looked at more like "spot" lights than area or surface illuminators and so mounted/aimed.
Well, my wife and I run them on our OT Jeeps. We both only run one and haven't had any issues with the authorities. This pic illustrates the amount of light these things put out in the daylight. One is enough on ours to illuminate most of the plate, but the way they are angled it lights up the plate enough to see all of the numbers.
They do make 'white' LEDs and they aren't 2 colors blended. They are a special version that does make an actual white light. But the cheap stuff tends to be the really bad versions of it, usually cool and bluish. They do now make very good warm white LEDs for architectural applications. I seriously doubt these are. And yes, LEDs are also inherently directional. But, again, they can be made to have a bigger spread of light with lenses, etc. But, again, I doubt these probably do. Also, they do make some heat, just not as much as incandescent. Heat is actually what eventually kills them, just like most any electronic device. No, they don't last forever, but likely a pretty long time. But, again the cheap stuff will not last anywhere near as long as the good stuff. Look at truck taillights on the road. Most are now LEDs and almost any truck will have some out, so obviously didn't last forever. LEDs are getting better and cheaper and fast. Won't be too many more years, they will be much much more common in buildings and all over the place. They are currently typically about as efficient as fluorescent, but they are much smaller and better for certain applications - like a car taillight for instance. With that said, for me, I would only run them on my old rides if I could find one that actually did have the same color of light as an incandescent (2700-2800K). Probably will be a few years before the goo stuff trickles down into the car accessories market as most people don't even know or care if they do. edit, nice pic above. Yes, color does look a little bluish, but not too horrible. And the spread seems not that bad considering how close it is to the surface of the tag. If it was further out, it would do a lot better. I could explain it in more detail, but in short, it is more physics of light than LED vs. incandescent here. Light hitting a surface at 90 degrees has 100% impact and max. effect. Light running parallel has 0. Light hitting at close to parallel therefore has close to 0 effect. Even just a few degrees is a lot better than 0. 6 degrees is 3X better than 2. See how the raised edges of the numbers is a lot brighter even though they are further from the light? A white surface has the most reflectivity, black the least obviously. Therefore it takes less light to illuminate white and technically impossible to illuminate a pure true black.
I'm not crazy about LED's, especially on an older car. It's the strobe affect that bothers me more than the color.
They shouldn't be any strobing going on as they run off DC like the rest of the stuff on your car. Even on AC, LEDs don't strobe. If you are seeing a flicker, it is from your alt. and an incandescent would be even more likely to do it as the brightness is directly related to the voltage. LEDs however, typically will put out the same light output over a range of voltages before they just turn off. A lot of LEDs are dimmable though and some actually will dim with just a normal incandescent dimmer - those might flicker with voltage changes. Side note, new fluorescents don't strobe anymore either - at least the decent ones anyway. They have electronic ballasts that operate at around 22,000 hz, no way you can see that. The old magnetic ballasts did operate at standard 60 hz and you could see that flicker. But, at least here in CA, it isn't legal to sell the old mag. ones anymore for efficiency reasons.
I hope those things are cheap, I can buy a flashlight with 9 of them at Harbor Freight for $3 for a pair.
A friend of mine came from houston to austin for a car show.he has lighted bumper bolts on his 46 merc.that come on with brake lights.got stopped in austin by cops and recieved a warning ticket and was told they were illegal.he went back to houston and still has them on his car.i guess it depends on which cops stops you
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