Lighting Brain Teaser!

[Brian McVickers]

Hi, heres a lighting brain twister for you!

I have installed two LED auxiliary lights and I'm having some flashing issues with them. Each light contains 4 LEDs producing 1000 lumens and each light draws 10W, so 20W total for the pair.

About two minutes after I first turn them on they begin to flicker rapidly and randomly. One does it more than the other.

All connections are tight and my primary headlight is constant with no issues.

The lights are wired direct to the batter through a switch.

At first I thought it was just happening at 2000+RPM because everytime I would stop they would stay constant but now after checking them again they also flicker at idle -- now here is the twister -- as soon as I pull on the front brake lever the lights stop flickering and shine constant!

Any ideas?

 

[RHINO]

is your ground also direct to the battery?
you could have a bad connection in the system not directly related to the lights and the added load is showing up now. the brake lever bit isnt as odd as you may think... often times you can have a problem with X load that goes away with Y load because it sends the signal to "dump juice" into the sytem. your LEDS flash while your filament bulb stay put is because the low wattage LEDS are the less resistive path. the reg/rec takes the pulsing power into a steady stream,, you could also be looking at a reg/rec problem showing up now with the added load.

i dont really know much about it, but i have been in a similar boat many times before and just put in the time to systematically run through it and finally fix the problem.

 

[ThomD]

It could be that at low output your voltage regulator is putting out "dirty" power. I had the same problem on my LED tail lights. The vendor sent me a magic doohickey that I wired in to solve the problem. Might have been a capacitor.