LED headlights

J

jjmoneysauce

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Jan 13, 2018
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Location
Saskatchewan
Saw a guy up in Alaska who is running LED pods for headlights on an old Enticer, using the stock AC power harness. This got me to thinking,

- Would the LEDs only be running on one half of the sine wave?
- If I connected two pods to the same power wire with the opposite polarity, would one pod catch one half of the sine wave and the other pod the other half, using up a full 60W?
- Does this sound remotely sane?
- Has anybody done something similar or electrically geeky enough to answer? Yes in theory the LED lights require rectification, but hey, it works for the one guy!
 

jjmoneysauce said:
Saw a guy up in Alaska who is running LED pods for headlights on an old Enticer, using the stock AC power harness. This got me to thinking,

- Would the LEDs only be running on one half of the sine wave?
- If I connected two pods to the same power wire with the opposite polarity, would one pod catch one half of the sine wave and the other pod the other half, using up a full 60W?
- Does this sound remotely sane?
- Has anybody done something similar or electrically geeky enough to answer? Yes in theory the LED lights require rectification, but hey, it works for the one guy!
Click to expand...

Yikes.. thats way over my head.
 
if it was an e start sled, odds are he ran it right from the battery or odrered one specifically for that sled. i am running rocks led system in my et410 and it is just plug and play. had no problems with it at all. might try one in the 1978 at some point if it is getting ridden enough.
 
same kit plugs right in on my apex as the one i used on the et410 and 1/2 that kit is in my 08 wr250x.
 
Running AC power to LED lights will really affect how long they last. The current needs to be rectified or they will flicker (sometimes it’s noticeable but even when it doesn’t seem like it, they are flickering just at a high rate). That being said you won’t get the full effect of them either. Wire a full wave bridge rectifier straight from your yellow stair wire(s) (or whatever color your wire is from that stator that powers all your lights). You can get one on amazon for like $5, the one I have has a very high voltage tolerance so the ~30 VAC from the stator won’t harm it. Wire the hot from the rectifier so that the new DC current will be regulated by your VR in the sled, now all your lights will be DC which will power them just as well if not better than the AC. Then simply splice in your LED lights to the newly DC current. Personally I like to wire them so that they come on when I hit my high beams, but that’s just me. One more thing, doing this will still cause some light flickering on the LED since the rectified DC is still technically a wave on a graph, so if you’d like to combat this, a capacitor can be wired, I believe between the VR and rectifier. Haven’t installed one myself.


This is also assuming you have a pull start sled.
 
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I have 2 different types of rectifiers. One is a weatherproof shrink wrapped one from Amazon, and the other is the proper rectifier. Plan in both cases is to use the low beam hot +12VAC and Y into the headlight ground. If I was going to add a capacitor, would it go in parallel or series? 2 sleds are electric start and 2 are pull start.
 
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