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Installing LED Lights - Randy’s Electrical Corner - Jp Magazine

OK, OK, while I am installing a pair of LED lights in this article, this isn’t necessarily about LED lights. Sure, I am putting a pair of Vision X Light Canons in an ’06 Wrangler. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that after all these years of harping on you guys about always installing relays when you put new lights in your Jeep, I’m gonna tell you not to. Well, this time I am going to talk about using what’s there. Sometimes you just don’t have to add more stuff to make things work correctly, and I’m about to show you how I figure out when it is safe to ignore old Randy’s harping on relays.

"Do as I say -- or as I do"

I’ve been told I’m dumber than a bag of hammers, and I’ve always taken that as a compliment. Well, Joy just told me, “It isn’t a compliment, you dummy!” I don’t care what Joy says. Who is going to carry around one hammer in a bag? And, if you’ve ever used a hammer, you know that the first one you grab is never the right hammer. So as far as I care, a bag of hammers is a smart idea -- that way you are guaranteed to always have the right hammer for the job.

Now I might not be the smartest bulb in the box, but I’ve been installing stuff this way for years and I’ve never had a problem with it. Neither have the Jeeps that I’ve used this idea with. It might not exactly be bottle rocket science, or maybe it is, but not adding extra relays and fuses can actually make your Jeep’s electrical system more reliable.

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I knew I wanted to throw out the factory fog lights and put the Light Canons in. I also knew I wanted to make the install as easy as I could. Since the Jeep already had factory-installed light stuff, I just wanted to reuse it. The first thing I needed to do was to make sure that the new lights don’t use more power than the factory circuit is set up for. In this case the factory fuse is a 20 amp fuse and the new lights are rated to use 4.16 amps. My rule of thumb is that as long as the new stuff uses half or less than the circuit is setup for, it is OK.

The factory TJ fog light connectors are waterproof, can handle the power I was playing with, and had a convenient spot on the factory fender to hold the wires down to. So, I went ahead and cut the connector off the factory fog light with about 4 inches of wire and soldered it to the Light Canon wires.

Since the fuse passed my little thumb, I decided to check the relay as well. The relay should be able to handle more than the fuse, but can’t hurt to check. I got a buddy at a parts store to look up this relay, and it turns out that it can handle 20 amps. I’d rather a regular Bosch-style relay, but easy was the key here, so I decided to plug it back in and run with it.

For a normal halogen light, you don’t need to worry about polarity, but for an LED, you do. If you hook an LED up backwards, it won’t work. So, I put the digital multimeter on the plug at the Jeep end of the wire and turned the lights on. If a minus sign shows up in front of the voltage, you got it in there backwards. No minus sign means you got it right, and the wire on the red lead is positive.

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Installing LED Lights - Randy’s Electrical Corner - Jp Magazine

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