Dash LED's are out? HELP!!!
 

Never notived it till today but my LED lights on my dash are out? I am talking about the ones around the Air conditioning controls as well as the hazard button. Does anyong have any clue if it could just be a fuse? I tried to look and see if any of the fuse names stood out but none screamed DASH to me? Well any help will be greatly appreciated.

They aren't LEDs, just some tiny bulbs. They probably burned out. You can go tot the dealer and buy the bulbs for an insane amount of money. That or you can get some 3mm LEDs on ebay along with some resistors and get crackin'. Take it apart and stick them in there.

I have the sam problem on my 95 se. The only things that illuminate on the dash are:

1.clock
2.manual climate controls (fan knob, thermal bar blue-red).

I need to fix up:

1. hazard button
2. rear defrost
3. climate control (position buttons that indicate where the air will blow.)

can anyone please gimmie teh exact bulbs and how many i need. Im going to the dealer, or perhaps will find another way out of it.

also using the leds, i wil have to solder?

Sounds like just one of the three bulbs burned out on your guys climate control.
One bulb is for the fan selector knob, one bulb is dispersed to backlight around the buttons, and one light lights the bottom (A/C + slider). So, the second bulb.

If you are going to use LED's+resistors then you can solder, but you can also use the plastic holder the bulbs were in (prob a pain in the butt to get the leads wrapped around it, but no soldering :) ) I suppose you could get away with not even soldering the resistors on by wrapping them somehow, but I'd recommend soldering at least that part.

Now sure about what exact bulb to get...but I doubt the dealer could charge *that* much for a new bulb...but who knows...it is the dealer...

someone said it was like $20.

Ouch... :shock:

I can get 100 LEDs and resistors for $20.

Sorry but can someone explain to me the purpose of resistors?

It's used so that the LED can properly function in a 12V system instead of the 120v.

You can buy 12v LEDs. Thats what I used in my headlights (dont ask) and for my dash.

where can u get 12v LEDs?

ON ebay :
Business & Industrial - Electronic Components - LEDs

The seller "cwithk" has good deals on 100 leds and resistors for $22.00 with free S/H

bah it seems like alot of work. I never soldered in my life.. can anyone give any tips???? :)

The resister is needed for current limiting and voltage drop. Using the proper resister value will prevent the LED from burning out early (usually they are said to have 11.4 years of continuous operation, but over driving it could shorten that dramatically). It is important to get the polarity of the LED right too.

Does anyone know the bulb number(s) (like LBxxxx or DExxxx or some such code) for climate control? And are these bulbs white or colored?

White LEDs are more expensive than color ones. Green might be a good choice on the dash since the transluscent parts are kinda green.

I see that lightlens.com has some LED automotive bulbs and I wonder if there are equivalents for the incandescent ones.

Calculating the required resister: R=(15 - V)/I where I is the current rating of the LED and V is the operating voltage of the LED. The 15 is the usual 12v plus a safety factor to account for voltage spikes. Units: R is Ohms, I is amps.

LED's won't burn themselves out if the polarity is reversed, but obviously they won't light up that way.

The bulbs are white, don't know about any codes.

When you buy LEDs, the provided resistors are the correct ones to use in a 12v system so doing all the calculations is a waste.

None of the LEDs I ever bought came with resistors, so that's when the trivial calculation can be used. If the LED plus resistor is sold for automotive use, it most likely uses the equation I posted, although some will assume 14 instead of 15 volts.

((To match your own resistor: The hard part is not the calculation, it's finding out the recommended voltage and current levels for an LED; typical values are 3v and .02amps which implies a 600 ohm resistor. If the LED operates at a higher than recommended current, its microscopic junction overheats and it dims over time. For example, a cheap white LED at 3X the recommended current will last only as long as a normal light bulb.))

Daaaamn, I was looking for this answer for 4 days now.
How many bulbs do I need if none of my lights work?
Are there bulbs in the dash instrumental too? How do I get to those bulbs? Is there still a fuse for those bulbs?

i jsut got finished with this and i have never soldering in my life untill today.

it was kinda time consuming and annoying but teh finished product i cannot belive it looks how it does. i love it.

So far almost every LED auction at ebay has an option to buy resistors to go along with the LEDs. In most case it's a dollar for any amount of resistors or it's $.01 for each resistor.

Do you have to solder resistors to the LEDs that will goin the window switches? Or are resistors only needed for the center console?

Basically, all you need to know is resistors are needed when replacing light bulbs. If an LED is already there, then a resistor is already there =)
(window switches have resistors already)

If you dont want to put LEDs in there, just pull the front console off, twist out the light bulb sockets, yank the bulbs out, put 'em in your pocket and drive down to the local electronics store (Radio Shack didn't have 'em for me, but they told me where to go to get them in town).

Took me all of 2-3 hours to do this, including all the driving around town.

LEDs would certainly look cool, but I'm too lazy to do any modifications. The bulbs cost me all of about $.35 per bad for two of them.

Mike

would anyone possibly have a nice write up on this becuase I want to change my climate control bulbs which burned out and replace my gauge bulbs with a diff color. Thanks