Thread: Upgraded Reverse lights

Originally Posted by Bio248

......but if your rear window is tinted too much to see out of, why are your side windows not as well? i made a valid point and what you said was pretty dumb.

i was giving you a cheap option. making the reverse lights brighter doesnt seem like an option to me considering ive NEVER used reverse lights to help myself see behind the car. i dont know how you even can, no car has lights bright enough to light up anything back there. when i had my tinted prix (15%) out in the country with no other lights besides the ones on my car i either opened the window to see the mirrors better, or just opened the door and looked back. why do you have to be elderly to do this?

Rear windows are all 10% and the front sides are 25% because thats the law here. People who can't drive with their mirrors open their door to back up; as a stereotype, old people are bad drivers so I made the leap. You're kinda proving my point; the lights aren't bright enough so why not fix the problem? Its kinda like if your interior door handles stopped working and you went with the "cheap option" to fix them by deciding to just roll down the window and open from the outside. Not really fixing the problem. What was the dumb thing I said? Something about opening the doors to reverse? That was someone else who suggested that.

So RedDawn, I'm looking at a seperate, heavier gauge supply wire directly from the battery (or fuse box?) to the #30 pin? The purpose of the original supply to the #85 is to act only as a trigger, correct? I'm powering the lights through the new line into the #30?

Originally Posted by Doc Banger

So RedDawn, I'm looking at a seperate, heavier gauge supply wire directly from the battery (or fuse box?) to the #30 pin? The purpose of the original supply to the #85 is to act only as a trigger, correct? I'm powering the lights through the new line into the #30?

Yeah, think of the relay as a switch. When the coil is energized it closes the switch, meaning power from the battery will travel to the auxiliary lights that you are adding. The #85 pin would be wired to the reverse light's (+) positive wire so when the reverse lights come on the relay coil comes on which turns on the auxiliary lights. The whole concept is to pull power straight from the battery, not the reverse lights themselves so that you don't fry your wiring.

Almost all auxiliary lights use 55 Watt H3 halogen bulbs so if you tried to wire them right to your reverse lights without a relay you would be pulling 110 Watts or about 9.2 Amps (that's provided that you are using TWO auxiliary lamps with H3 bulbs). I want to say the stock reverse lamp bulbs are something like a 3057 bulb which only pulls something like 27.5 Watts each so 27.5 x 2 = 55 Watts or 4.5 Amps so you would essentially be doubling the amps on the stock wiring without a relay.