Replacing sealed beams with conversions

RustyRatRod said
The way his kits are, they take the load off the headlight switch by using relays. The headlight switch was never designed to handle high amp loads that come about when doing the H4 conversion. The hot from the headlight switch is then used as a trigger for the relay and the fuse is for the high load side. I have used one of Dan's kits personally in the past so I have first hand experience. The kits are 100% plug and play and he chooses the best possible components so that there's no guesswork.

Thank you, but I have doing this since the mid 90's. What I was after is the thinking below.

crackedback said
snip....

I use fuses in the kits for two reason. Fuses are easy for people to understand. I can also provide a level of redundancy that is inexpensive compared to placing a pair of circuit breakers in the system. If you don't have a level of redundancy in your system, when the breaker trips, you go DARK! Even flipping to the high beam won't work because the breaker needs to cool. My way, you flip to high beam, at least have some light unless there is a serious short in BOTH circuits.

What type of breaker are you going to use and at what cost? Type 1, type 2, type 3?

Type 1 must cool, still dead unless you run two, one for each circuit.
Type 2, need to kill power to the breaker for it to reset, not an easy task without additional wiring solutions
Type 3, need to get to it and manually reset. Not convenient in most cases.

Both times that I've had the OE HL thermal breaker pop the sealed beam lights were back before switching to the other beams registered as an option. On my own relay systems I use what you're referring to as Type 1. It is a rare situation where it's both convenient and safe to work on the HL circuit when they have a problem. I'd rather be able to limp to someplace safe and I figure that "blinking" HL's are better than none at all.

I've read on an off road forum of guys pulling their LED headlights due to poor performance. I think that this has been limited to the Trucklite offering, but I can't be sure of it.