Gen3 Headlight bulb nightmare

I believe there's an extended warranty campaign for the headlight issues. You should check with Toyota.

 

don't touch the bulb with your hands. Wear gloves and the oils from your hands won't get to the bulb.

 

Make sure not to touch the bulb or get anything on it. Are you running your headlights all the time when driving in place of daylight running lights? I replace mine between 6 and 12 months doing this. I shop around and usually buy a 2 pack off Amazon. I also had a hard time getting the passenger side bulb in correctly (tight space and short cord) for some time until I figured out plug it in after I got the bulb seated and not before which may be common sense for many. This caused it to burn out sooner.

SM-G960U ?

 

Your profile says you have a 2010. This issue gets re-raised here every now and then. From a previous post about it:

Some 2010s and 2011s had the eats_low_beams feature, which can be fixed by obtaining two $35 wire-harness additions and having them (carefully!) spliced in.

Carefully because there is some aluminum wire in the car's wire harness, and aluminum-to-copper splices must be made in a very exacting way to avoid being fire hazards (as many who owned homes in the US in the '70s could attest).

The problem is way more pronounced with "extra bright" bulbs, which have shorter lifetimes than standard ones under the best of circumstances. At most auto parts stores, the "extra bright" ones are hanging right in front of your face at eye level, and the standard ones are down by your ankles.

If you make sure to use the standard ones, that may ameliorate the problem enough for you that you won't even bother with the wire harness mods. That's what happened to me: the previous owner of my 2010 complained about not being able to keep low beams in it; I put in standard ones and they were fine for three years.

 

Change to LED

 

My Sylvania Basics were still going strong three years after I put them in. I only changed them because I was curious about some inexpensive LEDs I saw advertised that actually claimed "DOT". I like the light output and pattern of those, but they make so much electromagnetic interference that whenever I have them turned on, the radio can only pick up maybe the two strongest local stations. I keep meaning to try to find some noise-filtering solution for them but haven't gotten around to it.

 

the safety PC police will come and poo poo on ya because safety is no. 1.

 

In Prii that do use the headlights as DRLs, they use the high beam bulbs, not the low beams, and run them at a much-reduced voltage, which will have practically no effect on their lifespan (incandescent lifespan being related to something like the −13th power of voltage).

 

Just to try and help with my own experience in general with headlight bulbs: as already stated, although it sounds terribly unlikely, fingerprints on a powerful ‘ordinary’ filament bulb of high power, does indeed destroy its lifespan horribly. This is from my practical experience of ignoring this rule that is clearly stated on every bulb-box for headlights, and then obeying it after my bulb burned out in a few months.

It might help to explain why this happens, but I have never heard a believable theory, and so provide the following, which I will run with until shown wrong:

It’s implied that some kind of ‘uneven strain’ is experienced by the glass envelope the filament is contained within, and this seems so unlikely I have never believed it.

But fail the bulbs do! So as I don’t believe in the BS glass theory put forward, but know for sure finger smudges (even invisible ones) make filament headlight bulbs fail, I’ve arrived at a better one.

It’s all about heat, and the fact that these ancient design of filament bulbs are right ‘on the edge’ a lot of the time regards thermal limits. IE they’re gagging to burn out as soon as you power them up, just give them any extra push and they’ll pop.

My theory is, the almost-invisible finger smudges cause a reflection of heat that the bulbs just cannot cope with. They are barely able to keep going as it is without burning out, and all it takes is the thinnest oily residue, and this adds to the heat retention of the bulb envelope of glass surrounding the filament.

This didn’t sound significant enough to me, then I realised there is a ‘spreading-out’ effect of light from bulbs, which is what the headlamp is for…but in reverse, any light/heat getting sprayed out, can be amplified if it comes back into the bulb envelope.

So, in short, the filaments or on the edge of burning out from day one, and even the thinnest residue of finger smudges, the effect of running in a hotter use-case (think daylight hours instead of just colder night use) and so on, focuses the extra percentage of heat on that filament required to pop it, burn it out.

The residue must reflect the heat right there, on the surface of the glass, just mm away from the white-hot filament, straight back onto it. The manufacturer must try to make that glass envelope release the heat asap but it’s all very borderline as already mentioned, the design of a bulb in thermal terms for filament-type.

I thought also about how MUCH smudging the bulb gets during fitment, and concluded, it gets a lovely residue pretty much all over that glass envelope unless you obey the cautionary advice on the box, about not touching it/wipe with meths if you do.

This fits also with the info supplied by one of the contributors here, that if used for ‘daylight running’, the bulbs get a low-power only fed through them. This is an admission that the bulb is on the edge I’d say - the auto maker is not happy with anything like full power unless you are using these old-style bulbs in the cooler night air.

I make no claims I am right, only that my theory laid out above works, it is based on all the known information. It also explains why no auto maker or bulb maker comes forth and properly explains this…because just like Big Electricity Oil & Gas (Big EGO I call them), their norms are so terribly inefficient and wasteful, they don’t want to confirm that 500 gW of electricity is wasted every year (or whatever gW it actually is!), by their blooming awful car bulbs that make lots of heat and only a fifth of the energy produces LIGHT.

Because worldwide that translates into probably a billion gallons of gasoline burned just to run lousy bulbs. Just to melt plastic housings and burn out rather exotic filaments. With about as good a percentage efficiency for light-making, as the internal combustion engine (20% on optimistic calculations, the rest is heat, ie a great gas engine makes a pretty decent boiler, with a little fifth of its energy put towards turning a shaft…I mean, if anybody can use that by-product of the ICE boiler, it’s there to be utilised!).

My best guess anyway. Can;t wait to get my LED conversion work done. Done a few - about a tenth or less of Amazon ads for LED bulbs, mention Lumens at all. They harp on big numbers like 6000 Kelvin, for whiteness of the light output, and truly treat that as if it were the light power measurement. But I doubt anyone here, is fooled by that.

It’s just ridiculous. But I now know, only to buy LEDs, from suppliers that state the Lm value for their LED bulbs. In case it’s any use, an absolutely standard Lm value for a ‘normal’ headlight bulb, is anywhere from 280Lm (no, I don’t think so) up to 4000Lm, which is the hi-output short-life filament type, at the very top end.

So around 4500Lm per bulb, is where your LED surpasses any filament bulb. Just to confuse matters they like to quite it as a pair - I have no idea why anyone would want to know that two bulbs make 9000Lm of light output/lighting power on their surroundings (you will see the words ‘in a sphere’ used), or that two bulbs will use 20W of energy.

When you buy household bulbs, they don’t tell you 9 bulbs of this type will use 100W, after all, and a headlamp is not rated as 120W ‘per pair’ either. Me baffled. Often. Take care all.

 

I switched to LED bulbs. Direct replacement, hassle free. Philips is the brand (if i remember correctly) and no problems whatsoever. They are not road legal but i believe i’ll have no problems in annual roadworthiness inspection.

 

when this issue was at its peak for me, I drove in the rain at night to nashville

 

Does that help the headlights last longer?