High beams and driving lights, help me see better

Coming home from Denali National Park last night, I passed 5 different moose (that I saw anyway) grazing on the side of the highway that I didn't see until I was scarily close to them. I make this drive every 2-3 weeks in winter so I want to increase my odds of seeing 1200 pounds of meat ambling across the road with enough time to stop.  I've got a 2012 Subaru Outback.  

The stock high beams are HB3/9005 bulbs in reflector housings.  Are they worth upgrading as a standalone option to a brighter halogen or an LED?  Or should I just skip to auxilary lights?

If adding lights, anyone have experience with the new LED light bars or driving lights?  How do they compare to the old style 8" round driving beams?  Best/easiest way to mount them?

Some of the new LED bars put out some great light for night driving and seeing deer around here, Just don’t be that guy who has the ten billion candlepower light bar that doesn’t shut it off for oncoming traffic.

If I have ridiculous driving lights, I wire them to the high beams. Makes them really easy to flip on and off. Remember that when you blind someone, you now have a 4000 lb unguided missile coming at you with a closing speed of 100-150 mph.

I recently installed some KC halogen floods to supplement some LED Trucklites on the Jeep. I've been really impressed, they work much better than Hella 550s. Not massive throw, but a good spread and very useful for back road cornering and deer spotting.

I've got some Rigid Industries LEDs on one of the bikes. They're pretty incredible for blasting down dark forest roads and still being able to see off into the weeds and far in front of you. The knockoffs I've seen aren't nearly as good, but there are some solid brands out there.

There are some drop-in LED bulbs now that might be able to fit in your highs. Cyclops makes some good ones. Be aware that they have fans on them and are generally fairly large, so they don't fit everywhere. That said, they produce an incredible amount of light and are on instantly. I've actually not had too many beam pattern issues in a high beam application with them either. Higher wattage halogens tends to melt plastic housings in my experience.

I had hella 500 driving lights on all my cars growing up in the country. We had a lot of deer and the extra light helped a ton!

I wire mine on a switch and to the high beams with a relay.  Add the switch power by splicing into the highbeams. Then add a switch between that and the relay so when you have the switch on and the high beams on the hellas were on, but I can shut them off with the switch if I didn't need that much light.

The hellas were nice and had a lot of distance. Light bars don't seem to get light out that far but iv never had one on my own car to say.

On a side note I want to put one of these on my car,

Single 100w LED Chip

That would be fun on the front of a car. A whole light bar in a single chip!

Proper aiming can help quite a lot as well.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/a257/1347221/

Basically, point the car at a wall from a fixed distance, then adjust lights to desired areas.

Also plastic housings can get cloudy, might be worth polishing them up, if you haven't already.

Factory foglights aren't really useful for visibility past the nose of the car and are mostly used for illuminating the edges of the roads so you can see the lane markers, etc.

A pair of spot lights mounted to the roof rack, adjusted to illuminate the side of the road would probably help you quite a lot.  I will warn you to turn them off when approaching civilization and oncoming cars or you'll be "that guy" and that's not what a proper GRM person would do.

Keith Tanner said:

If I have ridiculous driving lights, I wire them to the high beams. Makes them really easy to flip on and off. Remember that when you blind someone, you now have a 4000 lb unguided missile coming at you with a closing speed of 100-150 mph.

I do the same with my lights.  Lights on the Jeep are euro spec headlight housings with 80 watt low beams, 100 watt highs.  The high beams also trigger a pair of 100W Hella 4000 Euro beams and a pair of IPF 968s (100W) that are angled slightly outwards.  600 watts with good color rendering, good spread and lots of distance lets you see very well.  And for when weather really gets bad, there's a set of 85W yellow IPF 840 fogs under the front bumper (can be run with low beams or just parking lights).  

The Hella 4000s are awesome lights, their only drawback is that they're downright massive.  9" diameter, about 5" deep and a solid 5 lbs.  But they're built like tanks and have good optics, so...

We recently addressed this issue on my wife's 2008 Outback. Both low and high beam lighting was pretty dismal to say the least. I sanded, cleared, and polished the housings and then replaced the bulbs with these: Philips X-treme Vision bulbs. I then ended up aiming the headlights a little higher (we passed each other on the road to make sure it wasn't blinding). It's a night and day difference, but I think most of it can be attributed to simply having new bulbs as the other ones were years old. 

In my experience, auxiliary lighting has really only been useful for setting up camp and such...not so much driving. I would definitely wire them into the high beam circuit if you plan to use them on the roads. 

I've got a couple of sets of Hella 4000s. IIRC, some cornering lights and some Euro beams. 9.5" across, they're not for everyone or everthing

I have our Sierra set up so that on high beams it turns on all the lightage. Lows (9006 55W each side), highs (9005 65W per side) and fogs (H10, 45W per side). In the middle of BFE with no light and no moon it turns darkness into daylight. On all my vehicles I've found ways to be able to do the same thing. more bulbs available at the flip of a switch is awesome. 

EDIT: also, the older the bulbs (filament type) the less they tend to put out. I've changed from old 9003's to new 9003's and with no other change the difference was dramatic. Then again, 9003's suck. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I've been debating swapping my IPF 968s for a set of the 4000 cornering beams.  I might need to build a slightly wider light bar to fit them though...  How do you like the spread from the cornering beams?  

After the first night ride on my new to me Vstrom it was apparent I needed a light upgrade.  As a motorcycle, being seen is just as, if not more important than being able to see.

First step was buying some LED driving lights from Amazon ($20 FTW!).  Paired those with an $8 harness/switch/relay kit and you have an easy install.

$30 later on Ebay (big money!) my replacements showed up.  Side by side comparison shows that the the manufacturer did a great job placing the LEDs and reflectors at exactly the same spot as the filaments were in the halogens.  Should put the light output in nearly the same spot without spillover or the need to re-adjust the aim.

Old vs new...

I don't have a before and after of the light pattern, but this shows that it has a very good horizontal cutoff in the factory housings.

Much LED.  So bright.

I'm now confident to do most night riding in traffic with and without the aux lights on.  The white of the LEDs pop in rear view mirrors more than the dingy yellow halogens.

Moral of the story- try some $30 LED conversions in the stock housings first.  Just as easy as bulb replacement since they are plug and play.

rslifkin said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I've been debating swapping my IPF 968s for a set of the 4000 cornering beams.  I might need to build a slightly wider light bar to fit them though...  How do you like the spread from the cornering beams?  

It's been years since I had them installed on anything, but I've taken some very fast runs through twisty forests in the past and been quite happy with them. I think I had that car set up with one Euro beam and one cornering beam. There's only so much room on the front of a Miata.

My answer is Rigid Industries D series with their driving pattern.  I have them aimed so that I have good light ~100 yards down the road and 25 yards off to each side.  The ~4700 lumens each does the job very well.

Who makes that bar and do they have anything similar for 4th gen outbacks?

I want to have the driving lights wired to the high beams for sure and I don’t want to run them in town, it’s mostly for the hills outside of Fairbanks where I live and the flat empty stretches between Denali and home. 

I wish there were more reviews out there on light bars that went beyond “wow these are really bright!” before I spend the money. I know the old players like Hella 500’s are good but I  just don’t know how the new LED’s compare especially for the money. 

Bobcougarzillameister said:

 also, the older the bulbs (filament type) the less they tend to put out.

I’ve been married almost 31 years.  

I know what you’re saying.  

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

Hitting the bottle a bit early today?

It using 9005s means you can drop in HIR bulbs which are a lot brighter at the same wattage, all you have to do is trim one tab on the new bulb. Another thing to look at is voltage at the bulb under load vs. battery voltage. If there's much drop a relay harness (don't buy the cheap ones) can help. 

My last Opel Manta, with the small quad sealed beam setup had the driver's side high beam bulb replaced with a carefully aimed 250W aircraft landing light bulb and the passenger's side was a 130W bulb in a euro housing from something. I liked it, but you could almost feel the 35A or so hit to the alternator when they came on.

Check out "The Retrofit Source". I put some of their Mini H1's into my old Focus and loved it (maybe 8 hour job) and since put their H11 style HID's into my stock WRX reflectors to great effect (about an hour). For those, be sure to check for specific vehicle info, as some will give way too much glare, but I was lucky as it's no worse than stock on mine. They may also have a "retro-quick" option to quickly and easily (relatively speaking) retrofit proper HID projectors into the stock housings with the option of using those for high beams as well. It'd look stock, but give better light all around.

I'd have a lot of 'splaining to do if my wife came home to me baking my headlights in the oven.    

I don't hate the low-beams honestly, except how often they burned out last winter.  I went through 3 lefts and 4 rights before I finally got a pair of bulbs that have lasted.  I know the pass side is a Osram Long Life, I think the driver's is a Phillips something or other but I have the 2nd long life bulb ready to go in.  It'll probably burn out when it's -40 like it did last winter, making it REAL fun to get in through the fender to replace it... I have been thinking about doing an HID or LED kit to replace these when they burn out just so I hopefully don't have to do it again for as long as I own the car because replacing the low beams on these outbacks is a PITA.

I think I'm going to try cheap fixes first: phillips xtreme vision's, 100w 9005's, or modifying a HIR bulb in the stock high beams; and a set of Hella 700FF's on a license plate mount.  

the trouble with "long life" lamps, they are not as bright. To make a long life lamp, they increase the size of the filament, thicker filaments do not glow as brightly for a given wattage.

On the axillary lighting front, a bunch of us RallyCrossers and a few local Rally America guys like the Diode Dynamics SS6 stage series bars. I might be moving to Pennsylvania soon, so I'm planning to switch to these instead of my single hood-mounted cylon light (PA requires aux lights to be spaced apart, so my center mount light won't pass).

Kylini said:

On the axillary lighting front, a bunch of us RallyCrossers and a few local Rally America guys like the Diode Dynamics SS6 stage series bars. I might be moving to Pennsylvania soon, so I'm planning to switch to these instead of my single hood-mounted cylon light (PA requires aux lights to be spaced apart, so my center mount light won't pass).

Depending on how that law is written, it may only prevent you from putting 2 lights right next to each other.  It may or may not apply to having just one light.  

In reply to rslifkin :

I definitely agree the devil is in the details. Even if a single light is okay, conforming to the "expected norm" of two lamps will have the pleasant side effect of not getting pulled over as often.

PA always mentions aux lights as pairs and specifies a minimum distance of 20 inches center to center. Because the goal is to make sure a car always looks like a car (and not a motorcycle), I'm planning on making the switch anyway.