My Mark 3’s side light (passenger side) has failed. How easy is it to exchange? I expect it will involve removal of some adjacent components.
I changed mine without removing anything
Its very fiddly …but can be done…I replaced mine with LED bulbs
The holder twists…if that helps
Good luck
Same, didn’t remove anything, but you will need to release the plastic panels from the inner wheel arch. Full instructions are in the Glovebox manual.
I haven’t done the sidelight, but changed indicator bulbs.
IMO it’s easier to do if you remove the wheel first.
I changed the sidelight bulbs without removing anything at all, yes its fiddly but not impossible. And as Chris did, I replaced the old ones with nice bright LED bulbs.
Thank you to all. I may well fit Led’s if it is a straight swop. Cheers all.
Same here.
I’m waiting for some LEDs for the side lights to drop on the mat, so it’s
nice to know it’s not a strip down job.
Ned
What are the advantages of using LSD’s? Is it life’s span or intensity?
LED’s you mean? LOL
They look better and remove the horrid yellowness and replace with a white light…but its not for everyone
Soon… all bulbs will be LED
Agreed, soon they all will be LED, and a good thing too if done properly. LEDs give out the same brightness for fewer Watts input than either filament or CFL.
Look for the candela rating, aim for at least 80 to 100 candelas per watt. Candelas are a measure of light ‘intensity’ emitted from the source. Sometimes the light ‘power’ is quoted in lumens, and a lumen is defined as one candela per steradian (a sphere has a surface area of 4π steradians). Lux is a useful measure for aimed lights such as headlights (lux are candelas per square metre at a metre)
BUT, watch out for the colour, it can vary wildly; if it is too much towards the blue end of white then this is a possible MOT failure. If a ‘colour temperature’ is quoted then aim for 6500K (normal daylight); 3200K is yellow tungsten, and 8000K is too blue.
BUT, again, and much more significant; if the LED runs too hot then its life is very short. Make sure the heatsink is adequate. Replacing a standard filament bulb with an LED in the same shape and socket is only viable if the LED heat can be removed. Car lighting designed from scratch to be LEDs has this facility built in, but a simple replacement bulb does not.
Almost all the LED chip manufacturers quote their product’s lifespan (of typically 30,000+ hours) when the chip is mounted on a heatsink surface of less than 55C. My whole house is LED lit, but some of the bulbs (Osram, Philips) that ran at about 70C-80C (measured on the outside, pity the poor chip cooking away inside!) only lasted a couple of weeks before flickering and then dying. The surviving others with finned heatsinks on the rear (eg Auraglow) running anywhere between 30C and 50C are anything up to four years old; those that have seen the most use have survived possibly 10,000 hours already.
Just swopped mine today for bright white LEDs and as above without removing anything…
Big improvement over the old yellow ones.
Ned
Hello and thanks Richard
You are indeed a veritable bulb expert. I think I will stick with a boring conventional bulb. LSD’s -sorry LED’s are not for me.??
By no means an expert, just an electronics engineer who has done some practical research.
I’m hoping to find some LEDs that will be OK as sidelights and interior lights etc; my main concern is balancing the lifespan against cost and how easy they are to change.
For indicators I expect LEDs will be fine because they will never be on for long enough to cook. Also native Orange LEDs exist, no filters needed. All LED chips are superb at surviving being switched on and off, much, much better than any filament bulb or CFL. The only problem I can see would be if some of the driver circuits necessary to adapt the voltage to a constant current might be unhappy, an LED bulb rated as dimmable will be fine, but if non-dimmable repeated On/Off/On/Off might quickly kill the driver circuit. (The chip itself will probably survive - I’ve repaired several cheap mains GX53 LED bulbs that a friend installed having forgotten to remove the dimmer).
I’ve ordered some interior, sidelight and indicator bulbs to see what they are like, they are so cheap it is worth doing some relevant tests.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0077J9N50
I have LED indicators all round in my MK1 and MK2 and so far in the rear of the MK3, but remember that you need resistors to stop the ‘fast flash’. But they do look really good.
I have replaced the side lights, interior light, boot light and both numberplate lights with LED’s
No issues at all and no resistors
You only need them with the indicators Chris
Some (but not all) of the LED bulbs have a shunt resistor built in to keep the CANBUS happy, this is needed because the LEDs pass no current at all when the forward voltage drops below about 3V per (white) chip.
The indicator bulb I’ve ordered does not have the shunt resistor and the supplier says to contact them if it is needed, so both of you are correct…
I’ve seen three different values for the shunt on assorted ‘error free’ T10 bulbs (111 = 110 Ohms, 181 = 180 Ohms, 221 = 220 Ohms) in the pictures posted on the product pages. These resistors will be helping to cook the LEDs by contributing respectively about 1.5W, 1W, 0.75W for a 13V supply, actually quite a significant fraction of the power taken by the bulb. Also from faded memories of using SM components a few years ago the resistors looked like only being half watt items so could fail early because of being overrun. I’ll know more when I do my testing on the workbench.
Blimey- There is an air of how many MX 5 owners club members does it take to change a light bulb joke starting!