Car Bulbs
Halogen
HID
It is a fluorescent bulb, so it has a ballast to protect the bulb from drawing too much current.
Wire a LED/Halogen bulb into a car w/ HID wiring
- All you have to do is locate the wiring to the HID ballast and cut it. Then splice in wires and the proper pigtail for the bulbs you have. Halogen bulbs just need power and ground.
- The HID has 5 wires. Two are grounds. On the power side, One is for the low beam, one for the High beam and one for the DRL. The DRL is the one that's gonna be a problem
Ballast
A ballast throttles the power going to the bulb.
- The ballast is, well, like a ballast or "weight" applied to the circuit over time to keep the wattage safe.
- a ballast is a transformer that steps up voltage for use with florescent tubes or other lamps
- old-fashioned magnetic ballast uses coil transformers, but new ones use electronics?
- the output voltage is as high as 600 vac.
A ballast isn't a transformer, just a coil of wire, called an inductor in electronics.
Contains both a
- transformer that increases the current form 12 volts to 25,000 volts to ignite gas inside bulbs and
- a current limited, to limit the current to 3 amps to not blowout bulb
- Unsure how fast the current limiter works...
- if too slow and you are across the load, you may die
Old Ballasts
- The old ones had transformers and such in them. Newer ones were solid state.
- The tar was for cooling I believe. The real old ones contain PCB’s and should be handled carefully and disposed of properly.