R32 S1 h3 high beam - 55W or 100W? Upgrade Halogen or LED?

[LINK17]

Can someone please tell me the  above? I live half hour out of town and no matter which one i choose ill get it wrong? I have searched thoroughly and i know everyone says h3 but ive looked t o buy upgrades and theres a 55W or 100W option? Im assuming its 100W but Murphy is an arsehole. Also does tge light s spread ok if i go to LED on the high beam?

[GTSBoy]

Don't go LED yet, unless you're willing to experiment and perhaps fail. They're not quite reliably good enough just yet, especially on conventional reflector lamps.

Don't put 100W globes in there. Even if you have put a full set of relays in to take the load off the headlight switches (dash binnacle and column dipper), it's not a good idea for the lamps themselves.

And if you want to know what type of globe is in your car, pull the bloody thing out and look at it.

[niZmO_Man]

LED = shit

Go standard 55W H3, and remove the projectors, get D2S projector retrofit + R32 brackets from Lightwerkz.

[blind_elk]

I'm running 100W in the high beams, have done for a number of years with no problems. AFAIK, there is only a 55W option for the low beam.

[GTSBoy]

2 hours ago, blind_elk said:

I'm running 100W in the high beams, have done for a number of years with no problems. AFAIK, there is only a 55W option for the low beam.

That all kinda comes down to how large the headlight housing is and how much time you spend on high beam. Back in the day with all glass 7" roundeyes it was trivial to put in 100W globes and not worry about overheating anything. Nowadays (or more to the point, back in the 80s/90s!!!) with physically smaller plastic housings and flimsy metallised plastic reflectors, the extra heat from a 100W globe can be a bad thing. If you don't use high beams so much, it probably passes without any issue. But for country cars that can spend half an hour or so on high beam quite easily, you start to see distortion and scorching in the back end of the housings. That's one of the causes of the chromey shit peeling up, etc etc.

[niZmO_Man]

mmm delicious current flowing through the headlight switch.

At one point in it's life, my car had 100W bulbs. How I know? the headlight plug was burnt, fell apart, some of the pins fell off. Luckily this happened before the USA boom so finding another headlight plug and switch was a $5 effort.

 

[zoomzoom]

Sounds like it would be worthwhile you making a relay harness for the lights. The general concept is that the headlight circuit is made with thicker wire, and is shorter than the factory wiring, both of these lower the circuit resistance and maximise the voltage applied to the headlights. Even small increases in voltage are beneficial as the power usually increases with the square of the applied voltage (but lights also have a positive tempco of resistance, so power increases are probably less than square).

The harness also protects your factory wiring, as switching high currents is risky to manual switches. As they degrade, the resistance will increase and cause heat to be dissipated in the switch, and potentially destroying it. This can also happen to relays, but they can be swapped out for less than $10 and 5 mins. It's not so easy replacing a factory switch. With the new harness, you'll only be switching 100mA tops through the factory wiring.

See if that all helps the output of 55w bulbs. If not, try seeing if you can find some higher power, maybe labelled "off-road" bulbs around 65w. Since you're talking about high beams, you don't really need to consider dazzling other drivers. As above, I wouldn't recommend 100w globes.

[niZmO_Man]

Probably referring to the Chinese 100W blue bulbs on ebay/etc.

Wiring harness is a must. I highly recommend projector retrofit, especially if you're in USA.