How many lumens are too many?

So I'm eyeballing some LED lights to throw on the front of the truck because LOL Halogens and there are plenty of roads where I can't see E36 M3 with even the high beams on.

I was looking through the selection at tractor supply because poverty and was seeing 1600, 1400, 1100, 900, off road light, worklight and all sorts of stuff like that

Since I hate when I crest a hill or turn a corner and the other person doesn't manage to get their high beams/off road lights/normal ass modern led lights off in time and I get blinded I kinda don't want to do the same but lumen ratings mean nothing to me.

Suppose the question is two fold, what's a decent rating that will let me see without making another person crash if I don't get them turned off in time and what's the difference between and offroad light and a worklight?

If you don't want to blind the 4000 lb vehicle that's heading in your direction, then you need something with a real beam pattern. What's the truck?

Never too many lumens. Just not enough focus.

We talked about headlights for this turdy old dakota before.

At the moment I can't justify the price for swapping to actual LED headlights on this thing and I don't think the headlight housings from one year newer will bolt into it.

I mean if they will I'll just go grab a set of those instead.

E: And I'm guessing from the statements about focus that both worklights and offroad lights have the problem of light EVERYWHERE instead of where it's useful?

Welcome to to the official "How long is a piece of string?" question in the car world.  It's not how many lumens you've got, it's where you put them, and – almost as important – where you don't put them.  AFAIK, nobody can answer this stuff better than Daniel Stern at http://danielsternlighting.com/  or by Googling (which will get you a broader discussion.)

Subject to correction from people who know more than I do, an offroad light is intended for what it says: driving off-road.  A worklight is supposed to give you stationary light to do a task, so the area it illuminates is probably smaller & brighter and its mounting provisions may give you more options.

The market is crammed with crap, so buy with care.  Not only are the products often crap in terms of manufacture or design, the performance ratings they give themselves are frequently based on nothing more than buzzwords that sounded good to somebody in Marketing.

And to add to the fun, apparently we can't trust our own eyes to give us reliable feedback about "good" headlights.  As you may know, the IIHS has just started rating headlights against an objective standard, and time after time an auto journalist praises the "bright, full pattern" (or whatever) of a car's headlights and when I look the same car up on the IIHS site the lights are rated Marginal or Poor.  (Daniel Stern can explain the science of this if you want.)

It goes without saying that a photo comparison of two different lights is automatically suspect unless you can trust the source and the test procedure.

The 2019 Focus is supposed to have some new ideas for headlights,  like high beams that don't blind the oncoming driver.

If you're talking about lights to supplement the high beams, there's no such thing as too much light, provided you can throw it somewhere useful.  For aux lights intended to be used with the high beams (anything that doesn't have a low beam like cutoff and that's not a fog light), wire them to turn on and off with the high beams.  That makes using them on the road much more practical, as you still have only 1 switch to hit for oncoming traffic.  

On the Jeep, I have 100W high beams plus a pair of Hella 4000 Euro beams with 100W bulbs, and a pair of IPF 968s angled slightly outwards with 100W bulbs.  In a flat, open area with the high beams on (triggers the other 4 lights as well), you can see pretty darn far.  And the spread is wide enough to see deer in fields alongside the road as well as have decent light around corners.  

For low beams, you're limited in how much light you can throw before it's just too much light up close.  Low beams that look super bright and throw a ton of light on the ground close to the car seem good, but are actually awful for seeing.  Low beams that put more of the light up near the cutoff and don't look very bright will typically allow you to see better.  

If you were just asking how to throw as much light down the road, that would be one thing. But you want the beam to be controlled enough so you don't blind oncoming traffic, which is a very different question.

Like rslifkin, I have my aux lights wired to the high beams so I can easily flip them on and off. And I don't run them unless there's a low probability of someone else coming - in areas where I need the big lights, I can usually see the glow of an oncoming car before it pops into view.

If you want to run them all the time or not blind people, look at fog or cornering lights. You probably won't find these at Tractor Supply. It won't give you a mile of visibility, but you'll never get that without blinding oncoming traffic.

"Offroad" and "worklights" mean they have no DOT marking and will just throw lots of light everywhere.

I found it's easy to separate "country people" from "city people" with one question: how often do you use your high beams. I was born and raised in SoCal and starting about 20-30 years ago, it became so crowded that right when you think you can use the high beams, another car comes around the turn.

On mountain bike trails for night riding, you want a minimum of an advertised 800 lumens.  Wait, we're not talking about mountain biking?

For my Jeep I bought a set of euro-spec glass headlights with Hella 100w bulbs. These are supposed to give a much better combination of pattern and brightness than all the aftermarket LED headlights. They also use a relay harness to get actual battery voltage to the lights instead of the 9+ volts that the factory wiring delivers, but they use one factory light output as the relay trigger. I haven't got them installed yet.

My long term plan is to mount a set of cheap LEd flood lights with amber lenses as fog lights and use the factory fog light wiring to run them. This will be supplemented with the biggest pair of non-light-bar LED off road lights I can find on Amazon. These will be white lights with a relay trigger run off the other factory high beam output run through a switch in the truck. This should give me massive floods for off road that can be toggled with the high beams but are switched separately as well. I'm considering putting a diode in to turn on the low beam headlights with the high beams too, but not sure the heat/power draw is worth it if I've got a set of godawful obnoxious LED lights too.

Flood lights aren't fog lights, FYI. Fog lights have a sharp cutoff to minimize backscatter.

Keep in mind there's a difference between an LED "bulb" and a complete LED headlight with an appropriately designed reflector.

In reply to Grizz :

How is the headlight housing?  Does it need to be cleaned or polished?  Is there a better housing you could swap to?

How is the aim?  Have you checked recently?

What bulbs are you using?   Are they getting proper voltage via a dedicated set of relays?

Would a set of driving lights pointed up at the street signs or at the sides of the road/inside of the corners make a larger difference for you?

In reply to Stefan :

It's 4x6 halogens. So there's not really anything I can do with the factory setup to make it not suck. The next year up got bulbs and a different housing but I don't know if they will fit in mine. Like I said, if it turns out they do I'll swap them cause bulbs are worlds better and give me more options.

In reply to Keith Tanner : 
I pretty much was asking how to throw a ton of light down the road on roads that are normally empty and dark, I'd just have them mounted to their own switch since you can't actually tell when the highs are on on this thing anyway. My high beams are dim compared to the headlights on my moms minivan, and her lights suck too.

It's more a matter of being overly polite on my part and not blinding the occasional amish or guy on a bike or random person driving.

Ideally I'd like to get a set anyway because having them when you need them is much better than not.

In reply to ultraclyde :

FWIW, those e-codes are the same lights I'm running (with 100/80 bulbs in them).  I'll have to grab some pictures of the output from my setup.  Mounting-wise, it looks like this (no, the fogs aren't blocked like they appear in the picture)

I think what I'm trying to ask is how bright can you go before it gets obnoxious?

 

kb58 said:

I found it's easy to separate "country people" from "city people" with one question: how often do you use your high beams. I was born and raised in SoCal and starting about 20-30 years ago, it became so crowded that right when you think you can use the high beams, another car comes around the turn.

I grew up in rural Minnesota, and even 40 years ago there was enough traffic that using high beams was tricky...not that there was all that much traffic, but there were just enough cars spaced out that you could only keep them on for a minute before having to dim for the next car.

Grizz said:

I think what I'm trying to ask is how bright can you go before it gets obnoxious?

With a low beam pattern and well aimed lights, you can get away with 80W. With a high beam pattern, 60W is already annoying.

With 4x6 halogens, the easy answer is an H4 conversion. It won't get you as many parking lot props as a brotastic LED bar, but it'll work. You can get a decent https://www.summitracing.com/parts/hla-003427811Hella setup from Summit for $90. Then measure the voltage at the connectors and possibly throw in a relay harness which will cost you $20 or so. If you want to run more than 60W high beams - I used to run 80/100W bulbs once upon a time - then you'll definitely want that relay.

The relay is a must with this truck, there's so much wiring crap I've had to fix because of the PO. 

So, um those headlights were used on the following vehicles:

CHEVROLET BLAZER 1995-1997

CHEVROLET METRO 1992

CHEVROLET S10 PICKUP 1994-1997

CHEVROLET SPRINT 1989-1992

DODGE CARAVAN 1991-1992

DODGE DAKOTA 1987-1995

DODGE DAYTONA 1987-1991

DODGE SHADOW 1987-1988

DODGE STEALTH 1991-1993

EAGLE TALON 1990-1991

FORD PROBE 1993-1997

GEO METRO 1989-1997

GMC JIMMY 1995-1997

GMC SONOMA 1994-1997

HONDA CIVIC 1984-1985

MERCURY CAPRI 1991-1994

MITSUBISHI 3000GT 1991-1993

MITSUBISHI ECLIPSE 1990-1991

PLYMOUTH LASER 1990-1991

PLYMOUTH SUNDANCE 1987-1988

PONTIAC FIREBIRD 1991-1997

PONTIAC FIREFLY 1987-1997

RENAULT ALLIANCE 1987

SATURN SC COUPE 1991-1996

TOYOTA TERCEL 1988-1994

Maybe look at H6545 Headlight improvements? 

Wait they didn't change from the sealed beam until 96?

Hell there goes that idea.

Grizz said:

Wait they didn't change from the sealed beam until 96?

 

Hell there goes that idea.

If you're talking about the Dakota, then I will definitely +1 the Hellas. They improved the visibility out of the front of my Fairmont a ton. I went from 55/65 Halogens to 55/65 Watt H4 conversions. I haven't done relays yet, but they still work better. 

Wait the summit link says 6x7, do they have 4x6?

E: I think I found them, 6.5 x 4

Any suggestions on relay kits?

In reply to Grizz :

Who needs a kit?  Just pick up some relays, wire, connectors, crank up the tunes and have a nice time.

Agreed. Kits give you a nice little harness, but they're fundamentally trivial once you know how a relay works and you can save yourself a chunk of change.

Heck.

Also I can't crank up the tunes because I still haven't fixed the radio.