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Messing with interior lighting

1815 Views 5 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  carlson03
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This topic has been well covered on the forum but thought I'd toss in my $.02 for what it's worth.

Familiar with voltage and current demand from incandescent, fluorescent and LED lighting in a motorhome, the befits of lowering current demand from the starting battery of the RL made perfect sense, so using info found on this excellent forum, a white LED kit for the 06 was ordered from ebay. It included vanity mirror, interior overheads, door/curb and bed lighting.

The pure white light emitted from the overheads became obnoxious on a recent road trip. Passengers complained of being blinded during pit stops at oh-dark-thirty. So I first reinserted the incandescent bulbs. The difference being less light output combined with a glare reducing yellow tinge.

I got to thinking about it and decided to order yellow and red LED's for the overheads. In this photo, the front fixture has yellow LED's, the rear fixture is factory incandescent.

Night Light Lighting Vehicle Car


Yellow LEDs make the incandescent bulbs appear pure white in the photo but it doesn't look that stark when viewed in person.

Thinking that ships, spies and covert agents of evil often use red to avoid detection from a distance, maintain readability and prevent eye fatigue when going back and forth between light sources, I tried the red LED's. That's a no go Captain. Este es no bueno. Maybe when going full undercover, they'll come in handy but for normal use, I'm scraping that idea. Besides, it turns the RL into what a friend called a "mobile brothel".

The door curb LEDs do their job nicely. They especially come in handy when the 2.5lb tea cup Chihuahua needs to step out real quick for a pee. She can see perfectly. LOL.

Vehicle Car Vehicle door Automotive exterior Automotive lighting


White LEDs in the bed do a great job. Way better than incandescent but I wish Honda had placed them differently. Have some ideas on what to do about that. Someday....
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I also put a cheap set of blue-white LEDs in my RL a few months ago. The LED lighting is brighter and stark, and yet I sorta like it. Under $10 for the complete set and I had a couple left over. The overhead in the rear were the toughest to remove. I did not mess with the glove box light and also left the license plate lights alone. I wasn't entirely sure what lights went where in some of the instances, but they all work (once the polarity is correct).

Diode Dynamics (site sponsor) has some nice bright (and different color) LEDs too. But I wanted to test first and chose the cheap route to do that. I would be tempted to try the warm white LEDs from DD.

http://www.diodedynamics.com/store/2006-2013-honda-ridgeline-led-kit

(replacing my OEM bulbs also fixed a quirky front map light too).
I used warm white LEDs specifically for the above reasons. They're the closest to the incandescent color of the stock bulbs.
I had upgraded my Accord interior with LED lights, love them, wife thinks they are too bright, so she only let me put them in the RL bed since she drives the RL. Makes a massive difference in the bed lighting.
Yup warm white in the interior and bright white in the bed. Works perfect for my needs. There is no way in hell I'd install bright whites inside
Yup warm white in the interior and bright white in the bed. Works perfect for my needs. There is no way in hell I'd install bright whites inside
May look into the warm white ones, wife might like that...I have the bright whites in my accord and love the output, but probably just personal
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