#Halogen vs hid car light upgrade#
#Halogen vs hid car light Pc#

#Halogen vs hid car light Pc#

When turned on the pc board will heat up very quickly but very little heat radiates from the front. The LED’s are mounted to a flat pc board (electronic circuit board) and all facing in the same direction. One of the reasons is that unlike halogens and metal halides, LED’s generate heat behind them. They have replaced other forms of lighting in most applications but have struggled with delivering value in the big field sports.

LED’s are the latest innovation and have been in the market for about 10 years. This can be a nuisance, particularly when mounted 25m in the air. On-going maintenance can be expensive as the bulbs have to be replaced regularly. The units are cheap to buy and are very proven in the field. Metal Halide has been the main-stay of high powered sports lighting for decades and provides very good light economically. A frustrating fact of metal halides is that once they turn off they have a significant re-start time of about 10 minutes. Like halogens, the heat comes out the front, allowing for light weight, typically metal pressed bodies or housings and glass fronts. In fact, a metal halide lamp will lose 25% of its original performance within the first 250 hours of use. These types of lighting are more efficient than halogen but their useful life peaks very quickly, and their performance deteriorates after a few hundred hours. Metal Halide and Sodium Vapour are discharge lamps, much like a fluorescent tube, where the gas is the lamp is glowing, rather than a filament like with halogen. The main advantage of halogen is that they are cheap to buy but are really only suitable for small club or personal use due to their short life span and inefficiencies. This means the lamps can be quite small and mounted easily. However, the heat is all out the front of the lamp so the housing can be made from any material (metal, aluminium, plastic etc) and the front lens (typically glass) manages the heat. As a large part of the energy goes into the heat side of the equation, the halogen light is not very efficient from an energy perspective and is generally only able to be used for small court type sports like tennis. This glows, producing light and a lot of heat.

Traditional halogen lamps use a filament which heats up as the electricity passes through.

#Halogen vs hid car light upgrade#

All have benefits and disadvantages in certain circumstances and it’s important to understand these when considering an upgrade or changing lights.

Filament (halogen), discharge (metal halide and HID) and LED. There are currently three main forms of lighting used in sport applications.