How To: LED Doors

Hello All. I decided to do a new thread since it's gonna have a lot of pics. I finished the back passenger side door, both inside handle and outside handle.

I used 1" LED strip lights from Home page. Each of the 4 doors have 1 1" LED light strip per door handle on the outside handles. The 2 front doors have 2 1" LED light strips on the inside door panel; 1 in the door handle, and 1 in the "cup holder/pocket." The 2 rear doors use 1 1" LED light strip per inside door panel/handle. I used mostly 18g wire purchased in 100 ft length on eBay.

The inside door panels are all wired to turn on when the doors are opened. The outside door handles are tapped into the rear inside dome light, so they turn on when the car is unlocked or when standing close to the drivers door when the key fob is detected.

Now, credit for the idea must be giving to Rodney/Hawaiianbuilt for the LED lighting. Here is a link to his page:
JDM / Japanese VIP Styling: My Prius III Build | Page 40 | PriusChat

Also, I want to give credit to CivicSky for a great pic thread with the instructions on how to tap into the front driver and passenger panels in order to get the power source for all of the inside LED lighting. His thread is here:
DIY JDM style side mirrors combo lights (Signal+Parking+Courtesy lights) | PriusChat
CivicSky gave me the courage to finally tap into the rear dome light. I did the wiring a bit different but in theory it's the same. What I did was use a universal LED kit that had one of those spring plugs that fits different size bulb housings. This has a wire attached to it that plugs into the actual LED panel. SO I decided to just tap into the wire and split it down both sides of the car, and bam it worked...haha yeah it's kinda ghetto =P

Anyway on to the pics!
First undo the two screws.

Then starting at the bottom of the panel gently? pull the panel from the door....I seriously just put my head into the panel and yanked...and luckily didn't break any clips =)

Door panel off

Remove the door guard. You can see in this pic the other wires I used from tapping into the dome light, also the rca cable for the sub in the trunk. Yes I wire tied everything afterwards hehe

Remove the inside panel on the B piller.

This stumped me...the front doors were easy enough to run the wires through the door grommets. The rear door has a plug. Soooo the top on bottom of the plug has a little notch that I drilled out in order to get the cable through. Now, I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but I couldn't for that life of me figure out how. That and I'm impatient and lazy, thus I drilled!

Pull off the rubber grommet so that you can run the wire through it. This was by far the hardest most time consuming part, requiring lots of curse words, cut up hands and patience. The front door again was ez pz This was a b!tch...for me at least.

Wire ran through B biller. Again I was doing the outside and inside door handle and because I was tapping into different sources for them to turn on, I had to run 2 sets of wires. 1 through the drilled out top notch and the other through the lower drilled out notch.

Here you can kinda see how the wire comes out of the plug.

This is how the wires once ran through the door look. I used Gorilla tap on the inside of the door to keep the wires out of the way of the windows and to keep them quiet. You do have to cut into the plastic sheet in order to access things inside the door. I found trying to pull the plastic off left black sticky stuff everywhere which is a pain in the arse to get off your clothes for example...not that I know haha. Ok I do...

I guess it's not too late to tell you that the window should be rolled up all the way. I forgot that I had the window cracked which made me think it was harder then the other side I did...duh. The yellow clip in the pic is part of the outside door handle attachment.

Now is a good time to take some deep breaths and relax cause you're about to drill a hole into your precious car. I jammed a rag into the door while fully pulled out 1: to keep the door handle open enough to get the drill bit in and 2: to keep from scratching the door. I used a dremal with a drill bit just big enough to get the wire through the hole.

You want to drill the handle towards the front of the car. This is because there is less movement for the wires, and it's really the only way to get the wire to the inside of the door.

Hole Drilled. Remember to put Silicone over the hole once the LED is mounted!!
This is what the 1" LED light strip looks like. You will need to cut off the plug in order to send the wires through the door.

Wire on the inside of the door. Remember to give your self enough wire to work with so that you can splice/solder/connect to the other wires already ran into the door keeping in mind that you need to route the wire around the window tracks.

LED strip mounted using supplied 3M tap. Lovely. And super low profile.

Ok I gotta admit I rushed the heck out of this part. But when my wife and 5 year old are yelling at me to come inside to eat dinner I listen...I don't need 2 p!ssed off girls in the house! Again please take care in your wire routing. I use gorilla tap cause it's strong and that;s all I had at the time. I will more than likely go back in the door to shorting the wires and solder them. But the again like I said, I'm impatient and lazy...and they work anyway...

Ok dinner was yummy. Back to the car. I used T taps to connect to the wires coming from the dome light. Again, using wire ties after the install will keep everything nice and tidy and less likely to get damaged. Job Done!

For the door panel LED I again used a 1" LED strip. I drilled from the back side of the door panel making sure to clean up the hole after. Cut the plug off the LED wiring to get it through the hole.

Yay. Don't drill too far back or else you won't be able to get the plastic cover back on.

This is under the front door guard panel where I have already ran a bunch of other wires for LEDs. I used T taps to tap into the wires. Refer back to CivicSky's link to see how the wiring is done behind the passenger side kick panel.

Put all the door guard panels back on, the B pillar panel, and stand back and enjoy!


If any one has questions please feel free to ask, and I will do my best to answer them in a timely manner. It was fun stuff doing all the lights, and for now I think I'm done...except I'm going to change the blue lights for the feet lighting to purple. Have a great night!

 

Thanks!

I agree! I have been thinking that for awhile. I saw a post from another member who used long strip lighting which basically made the whole underside appear to glow. I liked that a lot and will probably be doing that soon.

 

Ok you talked me (or I myself) into buying different lighting for the puddle lights. Vleds has 48" LED strips that'll be perfect for giving it a glow effect instead of the spot light look. And just incase anyone is wondering, I'm not representing Vleds I just happen to buy most of my LEDs from them as well as some other places.

 

No...the rubber grommet was not easy to put back on the plug. But once you get a corner going it goes on fairly easy. I found it eaiser to put back on with the back door closed accessing it with the front door open.

 

Sweet! Glad you were able to find away around that plug. If I ever get to the trunk/hatch lights I'll try and do the same as you. Thanks for your post