LED cluster light longevity?
 

I have been reading through quite a few posts that are a few years old now. It looks like quite a few people liked the results with the 5 light wedge for the cluster lighting.

I'm just wondering how they are holding up now (years later) and if anyone tried the "Amber" color to mimic the rest of the interior incandescent lighting? It looks like several folks had great success with them and others said that they burned out prematurely and swear they will never try it again...

I'm thinking about replacing the cluster lights, shifter gate light and overheads with LED's. White for the overheads and amber for the others.

I put mine in 11/08 and they are holding up fine. I got mine from ledlight.com. They are the T10 Wedge 5 Ultra Bright SMT LED Light

One of the big problems with putting in LEDs is that they are very sensitive to changing voltages. My LEDs are going strong after a year, they are rated 12-15V.

The LED itself will be burned out by 12-15 volts. That is why you have to have a resistor.

They do not dim very well either.

I am currently replacing 12v bulbs w/LED's in my model railroad locomotives. They are called "sunny white" to simulate the warm glow of an incadesant locomotive head light.

True...lone LEDs require resistors. My setup was 3 ultra-bright LEDs in series with one resistor (would have to look up value). In my case, a cluster of four in series would not have required a resistor but I could only fit 3...just need to do out the math and compare to your LED ratings. The pre-packaged bulb replacement LEDs take out the math for you but you're at the mercy of their single-replace-all-generic bulbs which may not be ideal for some situations.

Edit: I used similar LEDs to this:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3096133

Mine were rated at slightly higher mcd and voltages. The max voltage was a whopping 5V! Not sure why this would have superceded the ones I got, mine were also only $.99 a piece.

This is a great question Snook! Both my 300d's had/have VERY poor dash lights! Please let me know what you decide and maybe I'll drive down when you install them to lend a hand if needed. Maybe we can do mine too!

I put them in my W123 and they didn't last very long at all. No big deal, I just put the old ones back in. They're nice when they work.

Have any of you guys tried these in the cluster? They have them in "Warm White".

http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/index.cgi?action=DispPage&Page2Disp=%2Fspecs%2F74-xHP3.html

Now that I see they have some of these bulbs in "Warm White". I'm thinking about just replacing the "shifter gate bulb" with incandescent and then the overhead festoons and cluster bulbs with "Warm White" LED's.

Again.... Thanks for the input.

A lot of times the optical prisms get dirty over the years. Sometimes cleaning them off with a Q-tip can do wonders if it is contributing to the problem.

so what was the final decision? Is it good to swap for LED's?

Properly designed LED replacements should last somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 hours.

There are thousands of design pages online.

LED's are very voltage and current sensitive. Only poor designs will fail rapidly. The majority that we would use are rated at 20 milliamps MAX. They will accept higher mils briefly at a cost of their rated lifetime. They are also very, very dimmable by just lowering the incoming current.

LED's should outlast the car.

I am looking forward to pulling the inst cluster and seeing what's up. I also heard of some people bypassing the reostat for more brightness?

Mine burned out in 6 months and didnt light up as well as the Osram replacements.

Yep, solder a jumper wire between the two rheostat joints--can't miss them, they are the only bits that are soldered on the board from the rheostat.