LED Door Sill Install Notes

About a month ago, I ordered some aftermarket chinese illuminated door sills through eBay. (specifically the ones the are have the misspelled "BULE LED" in the title) I paid $40 shipped for the set.

Well, they showed up in my mailbox on Saturday, so naturally I wanted to install them post-haste. I won't go into gory details or pictures, since this has been mostly hashed out before(search), but I will add a couple of notes that may help others in doing the job:

1) The things smell awful. Seriously. I read it on other posts, but thought "Oh, they probably smell like Harbor Freight".... Think again. I had to let them sit outside overnight and into the next day just to reduce the smell to a tolerable stench.

2) The are clearly made to be installed over your existing black plastic sill plates.(which simply pop out, by the way... I just used my fingers) They should really be called sill plate "covers", though the gauge of the metal was better than I was expecting. They are backed with double-stick tape, which seems like it will do the job. If not, I'll take them back off and use some real adhesive. I would rate the fit a 5/10. Dimensionally, they are right there, but the problem arises that the LED/acrylic housing causes a "lump" on the underside. This translates to a not-very-even fit when laid over your existing plates. Now that I think about it, I may have been able to cut some material away from the original sill plates to create a "relief" area for this lump, but the truth is that it's not very noticeable once installed. Still, I was somewhat disappointed.

Pro-tip: The rubber molding/weatherstrip has a "relief" area at the bottom of each door frame that allows a wire to run easily over the pinch weld. Mock-up the door sills and use a razor blade to cut away the double-stick tape to align with this area to prevent the wires from pushing up the sill cover or the weatherstrip.

3)Wiring... could not be much easier. Use the Toyota installation document that's floating around to tap the correct wires in the front footwells, and the front sills are done. Note that the gauge of wire for these units is really tiny, so I had to get creative to get contact on my T-taps. The rear is only slightly challenging in that you need to actively seek the +12v and ground, since they're not given on a platter. For my install, I took the ground from the rear door switches on both sides... just run the wire up under the side bolsters. (which remove with one bolt at the bottom and slide up once the seat is folded down) The +12v came from the same source as the fronts... I just tapped into the RED lead on both sides for the front sills and pulled a jumper wire through the B-pillar trim. Voila... constant +12v and switched ground for each of the rear sills, so all doors work independently.

Overall, the job took me about 35min start to finish, including digging up my copy of the Toyota instructions. Man, these Toyotas are easy to disassemble with the million plastic clips holding everything in place.

 

Perhaps the first sentence of the post is clear enough?

Great point about the OE Toyota LED sills... Only half of them actually light up!