One of the most common problems that arises when replacing stock filament bulbs with LED bulbs in most vehicles is hyper flashing or bulb out warnings. For safety reasons most vehicles use either of these methods to tell the driver that a bulb somewhere on the car has burned out.

How does the car know that there is a bulb out?

There is a part in the vehicle that controls when to hyper flash or show a warning. It's called a flasher unit. Each vehicle's flasher unit is designed to monitor the electrical load that it is powering. This basically means that the flasher unit knows how much current your cars factory bulbs will draw when they're in use. It monitors the vehicle's left/right circuit or monitors all 4 bulbs independently.

When one of the bulbs is burnt out, removed, or replaced with a lower wattage bulb/LED the flasher does its job and starts flashing at a faster pace on the side of the car that this has occurred.

How do you prevent the car from hyper flashing?

The solution is to either replace the flasher unit in your vehicle or add enough load back onto the system to trick the electrical system into thinking that nothing has changed. Correcting hyper flash or bulb out warnings when you upgrade is relatively easy once you understand what needs to be done.

Step 1: Find out the load value required for your vehicle

Load resistors will be required for all vehicles that do not have a replaceable flasher unit or there is no VLEDS replacement flasher. Now that we understand how the flasher unit works we can trick it. The trick is to put the original load back on the flasher unit. We have load resistors that allow us to do this. Continue reading →

If your are looking to upgrade your vehicles 3157 or 7443 parking light, turn signal, or brake light bulbs with VLEDS you NEED to identify what TYPE of socket your car has. There are 2 socket types, Standard and CK.

What is the difference between the Standard and CK style sockets? The position of the ground contacts in the socket is the only difference. Externally they LOOK identical. What will happen if you use the wrong type of LED, i.e. A standard LED in a CK socket? The LEDs will not work properly or worse, they will blow your fuses that protect that specific lighting circuit. Follow the steps below to determine which car your socket has.

Step 1: Search Google or YouTube to see what other owners of your vehicle are using

There is a vast amount of information on forums and on other websites when it comes to which parts or LEDs to use on specific vehicles. Sometimes the fastest thing to do is search the year, make, and model of your car with the the phrase "CK or standard socket." An example search would be: "2004 Subaru WRX CK or standard socket."

Step 2: Visually inspect the socket on your vehicle

If you are not able to find out the information using search engines, the next step should be to visually inspect the socket on your car. Remove the taillight socket and take a look at inside. Orient the socket so that it matches the image below. Standard sockets have both grounds on the left side of the socket and the high and low circuits on the right. CK sockets have the ground on the top and the high and low circuits below.

Click on the image to see it in full size.

Continue reading →

Welcome to our new and improved blog that we're calling VLEDS Insider. This will be a content-rich section of our website used to update customers on new and upcoming products as well as help educate them about various aspects of the LED lighting world.

Every day we get asked questions relating to LED lighting in vehicles. We're hoping that this section can allow us to answer these commonly asked questions in a thorough way.