Upgraded, brighter headlights but now have a "LIGHTS" Warning

It’s very late here and I’m quite tired, so I may be off base. With that said many light warning warnings/errors can be fixed with a MOSFET. Nearly all information you will read about their use in lighting is from people converting halogen to LED lights, but a MOSFET will work on halogen lighting too. I will try and gather more information for you tomorrow. Did you buy or build the custom harness?

 

You could also try the old school bosch relays: these do have a coil resistance that is drawing a significant amount of current, their resistance could be a better match to what your system is expecting. As a last resort dummy load resistors could do the trick (?).

Note that with those relays, your system has probably lost its capability to monitor bulb conditions. This is not so much of a concern as it's quite easy to figure out when the headlights are gone...

 

Do you have a schematic, or some sort of assembly instruction, showing how the components are connected?

The 3 relays are clear enough (but not immediately clear why 3 and not 2). Are the only connections:

1. the red loop terminal to always +12V power,

2. the black loop terminal to always ground,

3. the single 3-pin male spade terminal plugs into the harness where a high/low beam bulb connects, and

4. the four 3-pin female terminals connect to the new bulbs?

 

I'd find it remarkable if the check-control system had any "smarts" in it, and it would "learn" a new condition as being OK, but I don't have a US version Mondial 3.2 wiring diagram to even see how things are wired (I've got the euro version Mondial 3.2 wiring diagram, but there's no equivalent "check-control" unit on the euro version). If the 9-lights warning light came "on", (I think) your US OM indicates that the yellow A warning light should've also come "on" -- did you get both "on" before? I can say with some certainty reviewing your Installation Instruction sheet and jpeg of the added harness wires that you've done nothing to affect the parking/running external lights, so if the check-control fault indication was real, it had to be detecting something different in the headlight system. But if you only got the 9-light "on", but not the yellow A light "on" that has to be some sort of Gremlin in the check-control unit itself.

If someone's got link to a pdf copy of the US Mondial 3.2 wiring diagram, please post.

 

If the OP never answered this, I can venture to guess that the 'extra' relay is to have a separate relay (and separate fuse) for left and right high beams, to accommodate higher-than-stock power high beam bulbs that would be too much for one relay, and/or to preclude any single failure from taking out all the high beams at once. (At least that's how/why I made the harness for my Alfa GTV-6 with 100 W bulbs in the inboard high beam lamps.)

 

Why not just remove the warning light?

 

The stock bosh relays can handle 4 bulbs in parallel. The point in having separate relays and fuses is to avoid loosing all lights when a fuse blows out. The lights are more likely to quit at high speed, as on our revy engines, the alternator can pack quite some amps and voltage whereas at idle we are mostly relying on the battery.

 

Those relays are rated for 30 A, so yeah, they're fine for the four bulbs of the stock high beam configuration (~17 A total), and maybe even still theoretically adequate if you install 130 W bulbs in the inboard high beam lamps (~28 A total), but I wouldn't dare put anything more than the stock 17 A through a Mondial fuse/relay panel—remember that all the current gets delivered to/from the relays by traces on a (now decades-old) printed circuit board.

 

Jesus... I've welded with less than 30A on my TIG welder.

If you want bright lights, switch to some sort of fanless LED's. They are twice as bright as most Halogen style bulbs and usually draw under 2 amps each. I use this brand in my Toyota w/ H4 sockets:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089GSJDCF/

Ray

 

Just checked my service logs on the truck:

Osram bulbs draw 4.5-5 amps each
LED bulbs draw 1.8 to 1.9 amps each

Ray

 

Pet peeve alert: Be very careful with LED retrofits for halogen bulbs. Although some of the latest ones are better than earlier ones, they tend to do an imperfect job of placing the LED chips in precisely the right place to emulate the halogen filament and create a correct beam pattern. H4s are especially tricky to get right because they also have to properly emulate the Graves shield around the low beam filament (which is crucial to the cutoff in the beam pattern), so if Ray had a positive experience with the product linked above, I'm half-tempted to buy a set to experiment with... But unfortunately, I've found that many of these retrofits work OK in one lamp and not in another, so Ray's experience with the Toyota may not apply to other lamps on other cars--I've even seen one case where such a retrofit from the usually-credible superbrightleds.com produced an acceptable beam pattern on one side, but not on the other side OF THE SAME CAR (one headlight was factory original and the other was a much newer OEM replacement that was made by a different supplier). So unless you have an optical beamsetter aiming device and willingness (+money) to experiment, I have to recommend against such LED retrofits in general.

...But especially for a car like the Mondial or 308, etc., that utilizes one of four standardized headlight form factors (i.e. those originally equipped with sealed beams in the USA)--rather than replacing the USA-spec sealed beams with a ROW-spec halogen and then replacing its bulbs with an LED retrofit that may or may not safe/effective, you can skip a step and replace the USA-spec sealed beam with an LED lamp assembly that will easily outperform any traditional reflector-type headlamp on any car, regardless of the installed light source (halogen/HID/LED). I know for the 7" round type (308/328) the JW Speaker brand comes highly recommend by industry experts, and I can personally vouch for the TruckLites brand in the equivalent rectangular form factor. I don't know about the 5.75" round type (Mondial/TR), and I'm pretty happy with the Cibie CSR halogens that I have in my car, but the word on the street (i.e. a related thread on this site) is that Daniel Stern (https://www.danielsternlighting.com/) can now recommend an LED replacement (we're talking about the whole lamp here, not a bulb retrofit for an existing lamp) for our cars as well.

With all that said, one application where I am willing to experiment with an LED retrofit bulb in an existing lamp is my Mondial 3.2's fog lamps (H3 bulb). So far all but one (Morimoto brand) that I've seen on the market has the LED chips arranged longitudinally, which is correct (and fairly crucial) for an H1 or H4, for example, but totally wrong for effective emulation of an H3's transverse filament! (And the one that appears to get it right is massively expensive, so I've been reluctant to gamble on buying a set... thus far.) So if anyone has an direct experience with an LED H3 retrofit in an OEM Ferrari fog lamp, I'm all ears... thanks!!

 

Yes, I'll second what Joe says there. Retrofitting with LED's can definitely be fraught with additional issues.

In my particular case, I have a 1990 Toyota pickup. The stock sealed beams were tantamount to a little old Japanese man sitting on your bumper with a candle, so anything was gonna be an upgrade.

Before doing my upgrade, I reviewed a lot of different lighting options. I had previously built and installed a custom HID system on my Yamaha R1, so I had thought about going that route with the truck. Years ago, I had actually run aircraft landing lights on my Datsun 510 (in the high beam sockets), so I thought about that also. Eventually, I looked into the idea of using LED bulbs, since some of my friends had started using them and had positive experiences. The one issue I kept running into was the need for cooling fans on the LED bulbs. A buddy of mine had a nice setup on this Tacoma, but the fans on his LED bulbs were almost louder than the main Spal cooling fan I was using for my entire radiator lol. I really wanted something "plug and play", which didn't involve a lot of crazy fans or remote power packs, etc.

I finally ran across the fanless ones I linked above. I ended up giving them a try and was super impressed. Before installing them, I built a harness on the work bench and measured heat and current draw. I also ran the LED's constantly for a couple of days to see if they would over heat or blow up or anything. It's kinda amusing to leave a light bulb running all day on a battery charger. After seeing the LED's work for 24 hours+ on the bench, I figured I could trust them on long trips up and down the coast of California. I mean if they can 20-30 hours straight with zero issues, then I think a 6 hour trip is well within their ability. I will say that for a long time I did carry spare Osram bulbs in my tool kit just as a back up / just in case.

For anyone curious, I have a video on my channel which touch on these bulbs and the upgrade:



Jump to 15:54 in the video

Anyway, I've run them on my Toyota for just under 3 years now and for approximately 19,000 miles - absolutely zero issues and really had tremendous luck. The only issue I ran into was that on the Toyota, the blue indicator light on the dash is triggered by virtue of the inherent resistance of the old style conventional bulbs, so when I switched over to the LED (aka diode based) bulbs, the blue dash indicator stopped working. However, at the same time, I also installed some Rigid D2 driving lights (wired in off the high beam circuit relay) and those have their own blue indicator light wired into my dash, so that basically solved that problem. Between these H4 LED's and the D2 driving lights, it's so bright that I have to be careful not to blind on-coming traffic 1/2 a mile away. It's like having an SX16 Nightsun on the front of my truck frankly. It's just crazy bright.

The pattern I get with my glass lens housings (from China) and the LED's isn't going to win any 'beam pattern' awards, but as long as you have everything adjusted pretty well and you are on the road, the amount of light it throws is plenty. In fact, when I drive at night on the highway, it's almost comically bright at times. The highway signs glow so bright people must think WTF when I pass them and flip everything on.

My main concern with this upgrade was installing something which provided more light, but did not melt the wiring harness, nor tax the electrical system. As Joe mentions above, you really have to be on your toes when dealing with LED upgrades. Also, not all LED lights are created equal. There are a lot of comparison videos out there on YouTube and some bulbs are not well made. The reason I did the "leave the bulb on all night on the bench" was because some YouTube videos out there show things catching on fire or melting or becoming excessively hot.

Ray

 

Oh I should mention also, with my glass lens housings, I drilled out the rivets and pulled the inner shield thing out and threw it into the trash. It's some sort of little reflector thing in there. Didn't really seem to affect the pattern much either way.

Ray

 

I don't have the patience to document anything via YouTube video, but here's a link to the LED replacement lamps that I can vouch for as being superior to an H4 lamp retrofitted with an LED 'bulb':
https://www.amazon.com/Truck-Lite-27270C-LED-Headlamp-High/dp/B013FX3YWO 7" round for 308/328 (But—yikes—don't pay that price; they should be ~$100 less elsewhere, unless that price is for a pair.)
https://www.amazon.com/Truck-Lite-27450C-Headlamp/dp/B007ED7HNY Rectangular for '89-95 Toyota pickup

But, of course, it's really a question of how much you want to spend; I'm sure the solution in Ray's video is like 1/4 the cost of the purpose-built LED lamps, and even those were recommended to me by Daniel Stern as a "second best" solution because they were ~2/3 the cost of the JW Speaker polyellipsoid LED lamps that he was recommending as the absolute best upgrade available. ...But that was several years ago, and now there are several brands offering similar products for not quite so much money—even TruckLite, the manufacturer of the lamps I linked above, has superseded that product with a polyellipsoid LED lamp that they tout as a big improvement over the above: https://www.amazon.com/Truck-Lite-37270C-Round-Projector-Headlight/dp/B0BM8N7CSD

And, in the interest of completeness, I'm pretty sure this is the one that Daniel Stern recommended as his top choice (as of several years ago) for the 308/328 application: https://www.amazon.com/Speaker-Model-Evolution-7-inch-Headlight/dp/B075XY82J6/

 

I originally bought these for my truck, but decided I wanted something more vintage looking to help better match the rust on the rest of the truck:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWBRDJ5/

Word to the wise: never buy anything off Amazon with a less than 78-80% feedback rating.

Ray

 

On the stock headlights, the OSRAM night breaker do deliver convincing output. The beam is much more focused, so same power (in terms of Lumens and Watts) but not scattered all over the place (more Lux). This is even more obvious with the fog lights. There is an excellent post that illustrates the point : https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/headlight-bulbs.670280/#post-148901596

If one really want to depart from stock, Xenon retrofit would do a better job. Although the Xenon beam pattern is not a perfect match to the headlight design, it is still much better than with the LED (led do defeat the design of the glass and reflector), and you can still compensate the Xenon beam low efficiency with (no-nonsense) additional Lumens.

One clear advantage of Xenon: on the stock harness they can deliver more Lux while consuming less. This being said, you need to modify the relay logic so as to keep the main beam activated while using the high beam (Xenon do not like glitches). So even if the stock harness can be used a few mods have to be implemented (a Delay Off relay could do the trick). Also, be it Led or Xenon you'd better have a noise free electrical supply: the ballasts will play havoc with your FM radio and will not last long if either the alternator voltage regulator or the battery are on their last legs.

Adjusting the beam slightly higher makes a big difference. Worth trying before butchering the stock setup...

 

JW Speaker also makes JW Speaker 8700 Evo 2 Classic Universal 7" Round LEDs | 557661 | Headlight Revolution
They look less new age than the other JW Speaker 7" models.