Bed Lights

Reit38 · July 31, 2011

Latest "mod". Cheap ebay strip LEDs. ive seen lot of guys tapping into theyre cargo light switch to activate but i wanted to be able to have truck off and be able to have the lights on still. only part i dont like is that you can see the LEDs in the front corner if you get down and look up there. but maybe theyre not noticeable if your not looking for them

jblaylock · July 31, 2011

How did you wire them in?

Reit38 · July 31, 2011

tapped into the power on the trailer 7pin. ran to a toggle

BlackZ71Silverado · July 31, 2011

Looks good. I have lights in my truck bed but I took the cheap route. Got some BELL LED's that are magnetic and take 2AA batteries. no wiring involved.

Reit38 · August 1, 2011

i thought $20 for everything was pretty cheap

jblaylock · August 1, 2011

Have any additional details? Which lights from ebay did you get, where did you run the wires? I'm going to put a soft tonneau on mine soon and would like to do this.

Reit38 · August 1, 2011

ran out of waterproof wire connectors, they will be soon replaced

this is where the end of the LEDs is and the wire goes into this nice access whole then ran thru the box skin to the behind the tail light as seen above

Do a Ebay search for "5M 16.4FT 300 LED 3528 SMD Cool White Waterproof Strip" to find the LEDs

Silverado_Monkey · August 2, 2011

How did you run the LEDs to the other side bedrail? Did you cut the strip and solder an extension wire to get to the other side or did you buy 2 rolls? Can you show that in a pic?

Thx!

B

Great job BTW!

[email protected] · August 2, 2011

That's pretty sweet, same leds I use in my computer case .

Reit38 · August 2, 2011

it was just one strip. on the nbs there is not a lip to hide the lights so they are unseen so i had to run them inside of the box frame, look in the front of your bed and you should see what im talking about. both ends of mine were filled with a little foam so i dug it out with my finger and used a wire snake to get from one side to the other. not real sure how else to describe it. guess i can try and get another pic to try and show this a little better tomorrow

Silverado_Monkey · August 2, 2011

it was just one strip. on the nbs there is not a lip to hide the lights so they are unseen so i had to run them inside of the box frame, look in the front of your bed and you should see what im talking about. both ends of mine were filled with a little foam so i dug it out with my finger and used a wire snake to get from one side to the other. not real sure how else to describe it. guess i can try and get another pic to try and show this a little better tomorrow

So, If i'm understanding you correctly the middle portion of the LED strip is buryed "unseen" where it snakes from one side to the other. Is the correct?

So if you started out with 16ft of lights, how many to feet are actually illuminating the bed of the truck on each side? 4' or 5'? If so those lights are super bright!

Thanks!

B

Reit38 · August 3, 2011

driver side

passanger side

not real happy with the way this part turned out but it was all i could do without cutting them apart

sw6416 · August 3, 2011

This will be my next mod ........ love the concept

masonbid · August 3, 2011

Latest "mod". Cheap ebay strip LEDs. ive seen lot of guys tapping into theyre cargo light switch to activate but i wanted to be able to have truck off and be able to have the lights on still. only part i dont like is that you can see the LEDs in the front corner if you get down and look up there. but maybe theyre not noticeable if your not looking for them

Great mod Reit38. Those smd look awesome. I'm loving my bed lighting too. GM should make it an option on these trucks!

This is gonna be my next mod for sure! Great job!

BTW does anyone know how much of a drain these will put on the battery? I'm thinking very little, as they are LEDs, correct?

Not so little... 3 leds per 12 volts = 20mA

So when you have say a 1m strip with 60 leds, that's 0.4 amp its drawing. I actually went camping and my toggle switch was flicked on by accident without me knowing so when i went to start my truck in the morning, dead battery... Too me 2 days to figure out why my battery died 2 days in a row.

Reit38 · August 3, 2011

it is very handy to have them tapped off the trailer power so the key doesnt have to be on for them to work but if you happen to leave em on your in trouble. i agree it would be a nice option to have from the factory