Thread: Short circuit of OL brake light.

This is more of a "what the heck happened here" type of post, rather than a "please help me" post.

I have an Opposite Lock rear wheel carrier fitted to my D4 which included an LED waterproof light at the bottom to compensate for the wheel carrier partly obscuring the RHS tail lights.

A couple of days ago a neighbour saw that my RHS brake light wasn't working - the original Discovery RHS one as well as the wheel carrier one. Must be just a fuse I thought. So while checking it out I noticed that the lens cover of the OL light (I don't know who made the light) had developed a large bubble with a dark patch under it. It looked like there had been some sort of a short circuit that burnt out the electronics and some of the actual LED's. Also the smart computer in the Discovery sensed that something was not quite right and shut down the circuitry to the original RHS brake light.

So from thinking that I had just blown a fuse, I ended up paying $175 to get a new LED light fitted for the wheel carrier as well as clearing out the error message so that the original brake light could operated again.

We don't know why a short circuit occurred, but I did remind the mechanics that when they fitted my reversing camera, that they blew 2 monitors before having to install some sort of voltage reducing gizmo.

I had to buy a pack of 2 new lights so now I have a spare - however I hope that it was just an odd one off occurrence and that I will not have to use it.

Originally Posted by LandyAndy

Interesting.
MOST LED lights are multi-voltage and operate form 9 to 32 V.I wonder if you had some sort of a short rather than over-voltage.
Andrew

From my experience - there seems to be some "quality" issues remaining with the manufacture of LED lights which have probably been overcome years ago in the incandescent globe manufacturing industry.

I have recently converted all lights (interior and exterior, except for the mungrel glovebox light) from incandescent to LED. In doing this, I probably had about 75 to 80 percent success rate with the LED globes installed.

I had a couple of positions where I replaced the original incandescent globe with an LED globe and the LED would not work. Put the original globe back in and it worked no problem. Put the LED back in and no go. Put another identical LED into the position, and it worked fine.

When changing the reversing lights, I fitted two new LED globes purchased from Jaycar. Both worked, but the "centre" LED's behind the end lens in the right side flickered very noticeably (especially at night). Moved the globe inside the housing to ensure good contact - no difference. Nothing that I could do would stop the flickering. Luckily I had purchased three of these globes from Jaycar as they do not carry them in stock in Kalgoorlie. Fitted the third globe - no more flickering.

So, based on what I have seen, I'd say it is quite possible that the problem was simply faulty manufacture of the LED light itself, or the light assembly that it was housed in. With the number of LED's I have recently installed in the D4, changing from original incandescent globes in all cases - I have not had a single problem that you could see as "incompatibility" between the D4's electrical system and LED lights.