Fog light bulb recommendations?

techinfo.toyota.com you subscribe for 24 hours.. has basicaly everything possible.. or.. i hear. 10 dollars for all the pages you can download. I"ll be buying a day membership sometime soon.

 

I was thinking of switching to the yellow bulbs, but wasn't sure if the wattage would be high enough. I'm concerned about bumping up the watts without knowing anything about the wiring, relay, and fuse this is connected to. Also, don't know if the fog light housing can withstand the extra heat. So I am leaving this alone, because of these unknowns and that it will draw extra current from my battery.

 

why should you have to change the wiring when just switching to another 12v light bulb? I'm sure the housing can support any bulb you put in there. Unless you are installing an HID kit.. then yes.. of course you have to change wiring. Othewise that guage wire can hold a lot more than it's currently supplying. I'm sure the fuse should be able to supply any other bulb too.

 

Changing bulb to the SAME wattage is indeed no big deal, at worst you just burn out the bulb prematurely (that's why PIAA USA warrants their bulbs for only 30 days now). Changing bulb to an over-wattage one like many JDM PIAA models can be a big deal, at worst it can melt the wire harness and may be your whole car (yeah, it happens).

If I am not mistaken, our '04 - 05 Prius factory fogs use 9006 bulbs. If your goal is to achieve a different color tone, just swap the bulb w/ a yellower, whiter or bluer 9006 of the SAME wattage (ie: 55W).

If you also want to increase its output, then you can look into the following ways:

1) Use an over-wattage 9006 bulb (eg: 85W instead of 55W) but upgrade your headlight wire harness as well. Mind you, as the bulb withdraws more power, the performance of our Prius declines as a result. How obvious this is? Probably not but theoretically, performance IS impaired for sure.

2) Use HID conversion kit - this can only be done if space permits. I am seriously thinking of going this route. But this is NOT as simple as swapping a bulb. You need to change the wire harness, install 2 HID ballasts & of course swap the bulb to HID capsules. Conversion kits like this one typically costs around $299 + $75 labor. HID outputs 2 - 3x higher than stock halogen, lasts a few times longer & consumes only 35W instead of 55W. As a result, performance of the Prius should be enhanced.

3) Use HIR bulbs. HIR stands for Halogen Infrared Reflective and it is relatively new. Some engineers at GE found out that if you trap & reflect the iR spectrum of the beam back into the filament, you can make it get hotter & glow brighter. Beauty is that all you need to do is to swap your factory 55W halogen bulb to the 55W HIR bulb, that's it. Output is 2x as much as halogen which means it is approaching the HID territory and without all the trouble & cost, too. But then it operates at 55W instead of HID's 35W and choices are very limited. Luckily, 9006 HIR bulbs are available, and in a few color tones, too.

4) Use HID projector retrofit - I doubt that it will work for long esp. when we have no room for an additional housing to protect the projectors. So, I just include this for the sake of completeness.

If I were you, I will hold off a bit in acquiring any of the above as I would like to arrange something w/ Danny for a group-buy.

When choosing a color tone, people usually look at 2 things:

i) To match the same color tone of their headlight.
ii) To achieve better visibility or better reactive time by getting yellow, amber or even blue bulbs.

So if you have halogen headlights that outputs at 3000 - 3500K, get the same temperature of bulbs for the fogs. If you have HID headlights which outputs at 4100K, do the same thing for the fogs. This way, all lights output uniformly in the same color spectrum which is better-looking.

Many get yellow fogs as they think that yellow penetrate fog, smog, rain & snow the best; which is NOT the case. For all you SCUBA-divers out there, what color do we see most deep down there? Blue, right? Blue spectrum penetrates water the furthest. Fog, rain & snow are water-based. Red & yellow get absorbed prematurely fast by moisture/water. So why do people use yellow fogs for centuries? Firstly, yellow bulb was easier to fabricate in the past. Secondly, yellow bulb does have its use in the driving application. The human eyes react to the yellow spectrum the fastest. So under dry condition, your Prius w/ yellow fog on is being spotted by others the fastest - which translates into safety. Also under dry condition, all the objects being illuminated by the yellow beam catch your attention faster - which also translates into safety. But your eyes get tired easier as a result. As for contast enhancement (which also enhances safety), any monochromic bulb will do, translation: yellow, green, blue, pink, amber bulbs all enhance contrast for you as they contain mostly one portion of spectrum, in opposing to white's multi-color spectrum (ie: more is NOT better when it comes to contrast).

Hope I haven't bored you folks. There are a lot that we can do to supe-up our Prius, when the chance comes, we will discuss those one by one.

Edward

 

Another important thing that I left out was: Under the same wattage, the higher the kelvin, the bluer the color, and the lower the output.

So people buy those blue bulbs for looks while compromising on its output. If you want maximum output, buy the whiter bulbs like in the 3000K range. This applies to halogen, HIR & HID.

 

I don't know how welcome I will be here since I own a car that is pretty much the polar opposite of a Prius in terms of eco-friendliness, but I do a LOT of night driving and I have done a TON of lighting modifications (both successful and unsuccessful) as well as the requisite research. I feel I can offer some insight on lighting.

First of all, using a colored bulb has, in the past, been popular. Lots of people mistakenly fall into the pitfall that "more blue" is necessarily better. This is simply not the case. The reason for this can be found in the human retina. Blue and white light contains a lot of energy and it exposes the rods of your retinas (the brightness sensors) while not containing an aweful lot of other color information to expose the cones on your retinas (the color sensors). Also, since the blue (or purple in the case of Sylvania Silverstars) light has such a high frequency, it tends to scatter very readily, even in the eye. The net result is your iris does not contract as much as it should for the amount of light energy that is entering it and when you combine it with the blue light's inherent scatter, you end up with the phenomenon known as "glare" where you get a slight haze-effect to your vision. A similar (but more extreme) effect can be seen when looking at a BlackLight bulb.

What you end up with when you go to a bulb with a hue more towards the blue end of the spectrum is more night-eye fatigue and a more stressful driving situation (not to mention the fact that your blue lights tend to glare at other drivers more).

The only time a Blue bulb offers better vision is when it is SIGNIFICANTLY brighter (more actual lumens) than the bulb you are replacing and at this point you are severely over-driving the filament and probably overdrawing your wiring harness and relays. You have to remember that blue halogen bulbs are made by coating the glass with a colored filter (it's like a pair of sunglasses) so blue bulbs are ALWAYS less bright than a bulb with the identical filament but clear glass. (Case in point, the Osram Silverstar with clear glass offers superior lighting to the Silvania Silverstar which has a light purple tint on the glass).

The other thing to consider when night driving is color contrast. Think about this: Would you rather have vision that is black and white or would you rather have vision that is full color? When you use a bulb with tinted glass, you are skewing the overall balance to a grayscale-like level (except replace white with the color you're using). Using a bulb that is just plain clear glass ensures that the widest spectrum of its light output reaches the road (and side of road) to light it up in full living color.

I have mentioned blue bulbs and color contrast and now I want to address the "Yellow bulbs for Foglights" mentality. The only time yellow bulbs are claimed to be better is in the snow and in fog where they tend to increase the apparent contrast and also reflect less of the bright white off falling snow and hanging fog. They don't really light up the road better and in the end you aren't getting much more lighting. Are they worth it? Not in my opinion - I'd still rather have a white bulb.

Besides, you really shouldn't be running around with your foglights on anyway for a really good reason. With your foglights on, the light that is up close, right in front of your car is very bright which means the light that your headlights are throwing down the road is now not as relatively bright. What does this do? It makes your iris contract (to compensate for the bright up-close light) and you end up NOT seeing as well at distance. Remember, fog lights are for lighting up the road directly close in front of you Personally, I have never been very fond of foglights - I think they are nearly useless. I much prefer a set of driving lights that come on with my highbeams to augment down-the-road visibility. IMHO, foglights are for closet-ricers who think it looks cool to have another pair of lights on below their headlights. In the fog, foglights don't help you go faster since they project light only very close in front of you so where is the purpose? Perhaps the only application where I would find foglights useful is at night with wet black-asphault roads when regular headlights don't sufficiently illuminate the markers (because all the light is bouncing off the reflective wet surface down the road instead of back to your eyes). And it should be noted that a bright pair of driving lights will also alleviate this wet-road blindness except that you can't use driving lights with oncoming traffic so really, foglights are limited to traffic situations with wet dark-pavement roads at night.

That said, the best possible lighting you can get is not HID. It is very-high wattage incandescent filaments with clear glass. The reason HID is used so much (and typically better than incandescent setups) is because it just puts out so many lumens that it overrides the color balance effects. If you could use 100+W incandescent bulbs, you'd be way happier than any HID system. Also, the larger the reflector in your setup is, the more light you'll throw down-range where you need it instead of allowing it to go stray where you don't need it. This is why motorsport (rally) lights are always 7-9" free-form reflectors instead of small parabolic reflectors - less waste.

With all the above mentioned concepts in mind, what should the Prius owner do with his/her lighting? Leave your HID lowbeams - they are definitely sufficient. Use HIR bulbs wherever possible. A 9005 bulb can be easily retrofitted with a 9011HIR and a 9006 bulb can be easily retrofitted with a 9012HIR (note, both these applications require a small amount of dremel work on the bulb base tab ears).

If anybody wants to get further information on automotive lighting from the pre-eminant industry expert on automotive lighting, his wonderful technical pages can be found on www.danielsternlighting.com --they are written with a nice layman-friendly prose and offer the kind of technical detail that is very useful in filtering out the rice/flitz/geegaw from the actually-useful lighting products.

 

Also, I found this post on the PT Cruiser forums. It is a post by Daniel Stern himself regarding the use of HIR Bulbs. Notice where he mentions that HIR bulbs in foglights are a bad idea. He is referring to the fact that they will throw out a ridiculous amount of glare at other drivers thanks to a foglight's inherently bad focus. This presents something of an ethical conundrum. Being Prius drivers, I would assume you all are somewhat concerned with the environment which means you are at least somewhat worried about the rest of the people in it. . . so although HIR bulbs in your foglights will definitely result in an increase in light output (which is beneficial to you), you will also definitely be annoying other drivers to a greater degree with the excess glare. Now if you guys were driving annoying turbo civics with huge loud mufflers and tires that stick out past the fenders to ensure tossing pebbles in the air behind you, annoying other drivers would seem to be your game, but you are not. You are driving a responsible, worldly car. originially posted by Daniel Stern</span>[/align:4e622bcd91]

*lurk mode OFF*

Sean. Thanks for the kind words.

Unless I\'ve paid to advertise there, I tend to keep clammed-up when "Which light bulb to buy?" topics come up on web forums I frequent. Doing otherwise is usually against the rules, but if not, it\'s not fair to those who *have* paid to advertise. But, when the conversation veers offtrack from a technical perspective, I do tend to speak up. So:

Your comments are right on target if they\'re directed at all these "Silverstars are an improvement" type comments. Of course they are not, for exactly the reason you say. But I can\'t tell if that\'s what you\'re responding to, or if you\'re raising an eyebrow at the 9011/9012 bulbs.

The engineering does indeed support the increased output of 9011 relative to 9012; it\'s for real. Remember, the watt is a measure of electrical power going in the back of the bulb, not a measure of light coming out the front. The infrared-reflective coating does work as the article PTGrr linked to states it does to increase the efficacy (lumens per watt) of the bulb fairly radically. General Electric devised this technology a number of years ago, but they\'ve put more effort into marketing it in the architectural and stationary lighting field than in the automotive industry -- they had some teething problems with their version of 9011-9012, and pretty much dropped the project. Toshiba picked it up and put together a different design, and it works well. Also, there is no blue tint to 9011/9012.

Remember, even if we disregard the HIR 9011/9012 bulbs, there are a bunch of different 12v, 55w headlight bulbs, all with different levels of output ranging from 980 lumens to 1820 lumens -- that\'s almost a 100% spread in output from bulbs that are conceptually identical (coiled tungsten 12v 55w filament in a quartz or hardglass envelope for use in auto headlamps)! The differences arise from the design details of each specific bulb type. There is no single specific amount of light you get from a 55w bulb. You can verify this for yourself by taking a look at ECE Regulation 37, available from The UNECE website . ECE Regulations don\'t refer to the 9000-series numbers; the bulbs in question are as follows:

9005 = HB3,
9006 = HB4,
9011 = HIR1,
9012 = HIR2.

Moving along: Joem has a good, cautious attitude towards the use of these bulbs in low beam. They work well and don\'t cause glare problems in carefully-aimed headlamps that have a high-gradient (sharp) cutoff, e.g. most European E-code headlamps and some US-spec ones. The US-spec PT\'s headlamp beam is sufficiently well focused that the use of these bulbs in the properly-aimed low beams probably wouldn\'t cause glare problems, though this would bear some experimentation.

They would be most inappropriate for use in the fog lamps -- they\'d cause tremendous glare due to the lamps\' relatively poor optics and small size (= high unit luminance = glare regardless of aim).

Of course, there is no problem using these bulbs in the high beams, since there is no such thing as excessive high beam glare -- if anyone is in front of you to object to your high beams, you should be using your low beams!

Anyhow, that is all.

*lurk mode ON*

DS

 

From what I understand, the human eyes are more sensitive to the yellow/red spectrum than blue spectrum.

This is why anti-glare mirrors come with a blue coating to filter out yellow/red in the 500 - 800nm range and emphasize on ±460nm. This renders images appear on your mirror to appear softer & clearer with higher image contrast. This works on daytime driving (sunlight) as well as night time driving (from headlights behind you).

For all you Prius owners out there w/ factory HID headlights, do it look whiter (yellower) than those factory ones seen on BMW, Mercedes? You must think that they utilize a bluer HID capsule, right? Nope, both theirs & ours are 4000-ish Kelvin HID capsules (D2S or D2R). For some reasons, European car makers like to utilize filters (in the housing lens) to filter out yellow/red spectrum so the HID output appears bluish/purplish. I have heard of different reasons: To minimize detrimental UV rays output from the HID, to minimize glare & output so as to meet SAE standards. Have you seen factory yellowish/reddish HID beams if blue is so dangerously 'glarey'? There must be a reason for that, don't you think?

There are benefits driving w/ either full-spectrum or monochromatic light. It all depends on the application (ie: the function of the light - driving vs. fog).

Benefits of 'full spectrum light output' - they enable a light quality that is most similar to daylight, which is the most natural to the human eyes so we see 'more'. However, white light also scatters and disperses the most, and dispersion casues light to split up into different colors, so you use a monochromatic light (light of one color let it be yellow or blue or pink or green) and the problem of dispersion can be avoided.

So depending on the application, monochromatic light can be very useful & beneficial to the driver.

From personal experience, fog lamps don't necessarily light up the road directly close in front of me, they actually light up the LOWER portion (below eye level) of the road in front of me so that reflection from eye-level, lit up water droplets & snow flakes tend to obstruct & distract my visibility minimally. Whenever it snows heavily here in Mass, I enjoy the ability to switch on just my fogs while turning my low beam off, this feature is a life saver and that is why I dislike the factory Prius fog setup - ie: they are on only when the low beams are also on. In Japan & Europe, they allow individual fog lamps control, why only the US forbids it?

How can HID be "very-high wattage incandescent filaments with clear glass" when HID consumes only 35W?

The HiR bulbs that I have in mind requires no user-end trimming or cutting. They come right out of the box in 9006 config. A pure plug-n-play.

Speaking of haphazard glare, you know those modern day Range Rover SAE-certified / NHTSA-approved HID low beam? They beam into my eyes (via the rear mirror) every single time whether I am in a Prius or in an SUV, those need to be addressed first and foremost, not us when all we want to do is to increase the output of our fogs. Fogs are mounted low for a purpose - so as not to beam into opposing drivers' eyes.

 

I hate to be contrarian but you have made a number of claims that are not true.

Human eyes are indeed more sensitive to blue light but not in a good way. Blue light (thanks to its very short wavelength) has a very high energy and it also scatters easily even after it has been refracted through your iris and lens - causing glare (which is inside the eye and manifests itself as a blue haze over your vision). The degree of glare you get and how much of a difference it makes is dependent on how much blue light you're putting out with respect to the rest of the colors of the visible spectrum.

BMW does not use a filtered lens. Yes, there are HID bulbs that have a tint coating applied but they are not in use by any OEMs that I have seen an example of. Additionally, all HID bulbs will dim over time and shift towards a 5000K average instead of the when-new 4100K. Also, Phillips (the largest producer of HID capsules) now produces 5000K (to match aged bulbs when one burns out) and 6000K (illegal in Europe and USA) units that do not have a tint. Additionally, a large number of HID equipped cars in the USA use D2R (reflector) based systems while most german cars use D2S (projector) based systems. One characteristic of projectors (whether HID or incandescent) is a very large fringe of chromatic aberration at the cutoff - so when viewing lights very close to the cuttoff (like you would while driving in front of a projector-equipped car) you tend to see a much more blue or even purple hue. OEM HIDs are NEVER tinted!

Anti-glare mirrors come with a blue filter because most headlights are yellowish and using a blue filter results in more useful attentuation without a total loss of visibility. Monochromatic light is never useful for driving at night. The reasons are simple: Under monochromatic light, opposite colors will dissapear to black so if for instance you are using monochromatic blue light, yellow stripes will be invisible and if you're using monochromatic yellow, blue reflectors will be invisible. Why would you ever knowingly cancel out an entire color?!

Examples:

Notice the yellow stripes, the red roof, the blue sky, the gray car, colors on the license plate, etc.
[Broken External Image]:http://nick.dicknogs.net/full_spectrum/rgb.jpg

notice with the red and green light removed and only blue remaining, the stripes completely dissapear and the red roof now appears dark.
[Broken External Image]:http://nick.dicknogs.net/full_spectrum/blue.jpg

A different effect occurs when you make your light a monochromatic red: the yellow stripes are now clearly visible but you lose the ability to discern green and blue objects
[Broken External Image]:http://nick.dicknogs.net/full_spectrum/red.jpg

When you say that white light scatters and disperses most, you are confusing something. White is not a hue of light that occurs naturally. White is a combination of all the colors. You can also emulate white closely with combinations (or distributions) of fewer colors such as is the case with HID. The whiter the light, the better it is for revealing color contrast. Also, the coat of a deer has very little blue in it and a good amount of red and yellow so using a light that doesn't brightly illuminate those colors as well as the colors behind it (green contains blue) is asking for a busted bumper and some time in the body shop.

You are right about foglights illuminating BELOW the fog layer - that is why they are always most effectively mounted low on the bumper - the idea is the light they shine may slip in under a layer of fog (which often sits a foot off the ground because the ground stays hot from residual heat and thus the water tends to stay vaporized and invisible). The other part of the equation is that foglights illuminate the snowflake/fogparticle/etc from a different lower angle than your eye is viewing it and therefore you get less of the reflection off of it - so yes, foglights are good for snow and fog, but I wouldn't say that yellow is good.

I don't know what you are asking about HID's being high-wattage incandescants.... HID's by definition are not incandescent. I think perhaps you tangled my many points - Incandescent light puts out the widest distribution of color and therefore makes for the best night visibility but you have to crank it up to higher wattages to really get the max benefit from it. HID's put out a ton of lumens so they DO illuminate the road very well but they are not the best because they offer narrow distributions of colors. Even though they appear white, they are really just very intense combination of a few colors instead of all the colors. Instead of ROYGBIV, you're seeing maybe narrow bands of red, yellow, and blue. In industry testing, Halogen lighting offers a ColorRenderingIndex of around 90 while HID offers only a CRI of around 70 - meaning your eye has less ability to distinguish nuances in color when viewing with HID light.

There are no HIR specifications that will natively fit a 9005 or 9006 bulb socket. If they come like that it is because they have been modified. The only company currently supporting HIR is Toshiba and they make them in HIR1 (9011) and HIR2(9012) only.

 

nhluhr, do you mind if I call you Lu until you sign your name one of these days? You provided tidbits of right and wrong information here & there but I need to focus on the most important issue first: the color of light that is most sensitive to the human eyes.

You can say it a 100 more times but the fact is: the human eye is more sensitive to the yellow spectrum than the blue spectrum. Sensitivity peaks at around 550nm. As a matter of fact, between 500 – 600nm (turquoise-green-yellow), the human eye can differentiate about 7.5 million color shades. Between 400 – 500mm (violet-blue), the human eye can only differentiate about 1.2 million color shades.

Moreover, approximately twice as much light (quanta) is required to obtain from the blue-violet cones a perceived light level that is similar to that obtained from the red & green cones. So I am right in saying that the human eye is more sensitive to yellow than blue.

We both agreed that full spectrum white is best for vision but we differ in their use as fogs under rainy/snowy conditions, I will elaborate later why we differ.

You are right in saying that blue light scatters more than any other spectrum (that is why the sky appears blue), thus my earlier suggestion of using blue fogs is incorrect. However, you contradicted yourself when you said: “The only time yellow bulbs are claimed to be better is in the snow and in fog where they tend to increase the apparent contrast and also reflect less of the bright white off falling snow and hanging fog. They don't really light up the road better and in the end you aren't getting much more lighting. Are they worth it? Not in my opinion - I'd still rather have a white bulb.†So with the above ‘blue = more scattering†phenomenon said, you still prefer to have a white bulb to a yellow one inside your fog under snowy/rainy conditions? As we both agree now, blue scatters the most, white contains blue so white scatters too. Yellow contains less blue which translates into less glare and now I understand why they use monochromatic yellow bulbs for fogs. For all fairness, everyone is entitled to his opinion and everyone perceives the light differently. Maybe all white driving & fog lamps suit you the best, but I genuinely can ‘see’ the benefits of using yellow fogs during rainy/snowy conditions and you even verified that for me already.

Additionally, I would like to address a couple of things:

1. Firstly you said that ‘fogs are near useless’ and that they are only for ‘closet-ricers’, then after I have pointed out that how fogs have saved me under snowy conditions multiple times, you agreed to the advantages that yellow fogs produce under such condition. Are you coming out of the ricer’s closets? ; ) It can snow heavily in VA too, right? Try yellow fogs, you may like them.

2. You educated me about no OEM uses tint coating on their HID capsules. I never said that they did. I said: “For some reasons, European car makers like to utilize filters (in the housing lens) to filter out yellow/red spectrum so the HID output appears bluish/purplish. “ You concluded that paragraph with: “OEM HIDs are NEVER tinted! “. Well, I handled HID capsules (of various K) so I knew about that, too.

3. You said that “Monochromatic light is never useful for driving at night.†I totally agreed with you and never did I suggest using monochromatic light for driving lights, I suggested those for fog lamps; which is what this thread is originally about, remember?

4. Finally regarding HiR bulbs, you are big on safety issues & stock equipment, remember? Would you feel comfortable if I had suggested some 9011/9012 bulbs for Kevin to custom-trim at home by himself or should I have suggested some plug-n-play 9006 HiR bulbs pre-trimmed at the Koito factory in Japan like the way I did?


Edward

 

OK, I think we beat this topic to death. It doesn't seem like we should even use our driving/fog lights because they won't help much and they use additional power draw.

I think I'll get those cheezy little LED's that will make my car look like it has two colored circles in the bumper. (Just kidding)

 

Actually, I find the fog lights to be helpful in really thick fog. I drive a lot at night (I work the night shift,) and here on the coast it can get pretty thick. It's true that the fog lights only help illuminate what's immediately in front of the car, but when visibility is less than 100 feet, it's nice to see what you can.

 

Areometer:

When I say fogs are for closet ricers, I'm referring to the droves of cars that drive around town on perfectly clear nights with their fogs on because they think it looks cool (sometimes even with blue tinted bulbs to match their HIDs or otherwise rice-blue bulbs
:roll:

Regarding my taste for white bulbs instead of yellow - as I mentioned previously, I don't really have trouble in snow/fog but I do have trouble in dark wet roads like rainy nights so in this case, a white light is my best choice.

Regarding the HIR bulbs being pre-trimmed or trim-at-home, it doesn't really matter, since I live 30 minutes from Kevin and help him with many of his projects and I have a very steady dremel hand (I've done a couple sets of 9011-->9005 conversions myself for my various subarus)


cheers

 

I see. I know that for the longest time, every one was avoiding yellow fogs as it was considered 'out'. They will match the same color tones between headlights & fogs. That was when PIAA Xtreme White was selling like hotcakes.

Like I said, every one perceives light differently, I nearly seldom have trouble w/ wet roads. Snow is my biggest issue. I see your point now.

You installed HiR for your Subaru's driving, high beam or fog? I thought you were against all fogs! :wink: You will help Kevin to supe-up his fogs? Nice.

 

my current subaru doesn't have fogs (it's the car in the pictures above). I am looking for some driving lights that I can french into the bumper but for now, the 9011s are installed in place of the 9005 hibeams.

 

If I may sneak in here, where can someone purchase the HiR lamps.