LED taillight upgrades?

njs2247 · August 10, 2017

Thanks for the response Super, but I was wanting to know if the tail light, top and bottom, stay red while blinking at the same time with parking lights on. I'm asking because my front led signals stay yellow while blinking a brighter yellow when activated.

SuperSierra · August 11, 2017

Thanks for the response Super, but I was wanting to know if the tail light, top and bottom, stay red while blinking at the same time with parking lights on. I'm asking because my front led signals stay yellow while blinking a brighter yellow when activated.

Sorry I miss read. I thought you were asking if both lights blink or just the one.

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DEV1ST8R · February 1, 2018

On ‎8‎/‎9‎/‎2017 at 7:50 PM, njs2247 said:

I'm still having the same issue after switching out resistors. I noticed last night that when my blinkers are on, the whole tail light blinks on and off. I was wondering if you guys without problems could see if yours does this too when parking light are on. I'm asking because my front led signals stay yellow as they blink. I'm sure with the stock bulbs being dual filament,stay lit even when turn signals are on. I would appreciate it.

Did you ever get this resolved?

njs2247 · February 7, 2018

I did. I had to add a third resistor to the green and black wires that connect the upper and lower bulbs together. Unfortunately, a new problem presented itself shortly after, so I just went back to halogen bulbs.

The new problem was the driver side bottom LED light not working all the time and the driver side reverse LED not working all the time. Sometimes they both wouldn't work or one or the other wouldn't work. I had enough, so that's why I switched back.

adverbius · May 12, 2018

On 2/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, njs2247 said:

I did. I had to add a third resistor to the green and black wires that connect the upper and lower bulbs together. Unfortunately, a new problem presented itself shortly after, so I just went back to halogen bulbs.

I'm curious to know the details of this, or if anyone else has experienced or solved this particular issue. I recently purchased a 2016 Silverado LT CCSB, and bought some aftermarket LED smoke tail lights to add to it. I couldn't figure out why I constantly had hyper flash until I read this and realized that I was always testing the running lamps first, which work fine, then flipping the turn signal switch which brought 3 normal flashes then hyper with the "failure" message in the info screen.

For reference, I connected a 50W 6ohm load resistor to bridge between the ground and flasher circuits for each LED connection. I've connected them directly to the tail light wires, not to the truck's harness.

I just tested them again without the running lights and the flashers work exactly as they should. No hyper flash. So, With just the turn signals on, the flashers work perfectly - with the lights on first, the turn signals flash like madmen. What could be causing the running lights to override the resistance for each connection? And can anyone think of a possible solution?

I tried to connect a third resistor in a couple configurations across the separate connections, but it didn't work. Maybe I don't understand that piece of it well enough.

njs2247 · May 13, 2018

I didn't understand the issue either when I had it. My turn signals, with LEDs worked fine as long as the parking lights weren't on (i.e. at night)

Like I posted earlier, I had to add a third resistor to the black and green wires in between the two LED bulbs.

That worked for the hyper flashing with parking lights on, but then, some of the LEDs stopped working intermittently. After that, I had had enough and went back to halogens

adverbius · May 14, 2018

Ok. I have been able to solve the hyper flash problem for my application. I hope it might help some...

I've been working for more than a week trying to find a solution to this. The background is this: I wanted to switch my tail lights to a smoked lens, LED light setup. The tail lights came with resistors that were just weird, so I bought some of the standard 50w/6ohm resistors that everyone uses. The tail lights worked. The flashers worked on their own just fine. But whenever the running lights were on, I had hyper flash on the turn signals. Bear in mind that was trying to avoid cutting into the stock harness, so I was adding the resistors to the new light assembly directly. In theory, I think it should have worked, but no love for me.

Then I came across the comment from njs2247 above

Quote

I had to add a third resistor to the green and black wires that connect the upper and lower bulbs together.

This lead me to attach a 3rd resistor somewhere on the harness before the tail light. I tried several configurations to get this modification to work for me, but couldn't. Still good running lights, and the flashers worked fine on their own, but they continue to hyper flash when used together. Then I read a different random post by Dbeto54 in the forum topic "2016 Taillights":

Quote

I tried with both 6ohm you need 2 per taillight with 3ohm you only need 1 per taillight

So you don't have to read all of the contextual stuff, this translates to: "I tried both. If you use 6 ohm resistors, you need 2 per tail light. With 3 ohm resistors, you only need 1 per tail light."

The topic is about a new harness to add the LTZ LED tail lights to non-LED trucks, which made me wonder if maybe it had some merit. So I removed the two resistors from the tail lights (one for each LED light), and put BOTH resistors together in parallel from the ground to the flasher signal on the harness BEFORE the light. (FYI I had to learn that combining 2 resistors in parallel effectively reduces the total resistance - in this case, to half of the individual resistance. Good to know since I'm not an electrical scholar)

It worked.

I don't know enough about the electrical system to understand why, but for some reason, 3 ohms of resistance works to prevent the system from noticing a bad bulb (hyper flash) when 6 ohms only works half the time.

tldr: if you get hyper flash SOME of the time, but not ALL of the time, then try 3 ohm resistors instead (combine the 6 ohm ones you already have) just to eliminate this possibility.

Good luck!

SuperAllTerrain · May 14, 2018

Recon tai lights

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Hate Work · August 4, 2018

On 5/12/2018 at 6:15 PM, adverbius said:

I'm curious to know the details of this, or if anyone else has experienced or solved this particular issue. I recently purchased a 2016 Silverado LT CCSB, and bought some aftermarket LED smoke tail lights to add to it. I couldn't figure out why I constantly had hyper flash until I read this and realized that I was always testing the running lamps first, which work fine, then flipping the turn signal switch which brought 3 normal flashes then hyper with the "failure" message in the info screen.

For reference, I connected a 50W 6ohm load resistor to bridge between the ground and flasher circuits for each LED connection. I've connected them directly to the tail light wires, not to the truck's harness.

I just tested them again without the running lights and the flashers work exactly as they should. No hyper flash. So, With just the turn signals on, the flashers work perfectly - with the lights on first, the turn signals flash like madmen. What could be causing the running lights to override the resistance for each connection? And can anyone think of a possible solution?

I tried to connect a third resistor in a couple configurations across the separate connections, but it didn't work. Maybe I don't understand that piece of it well enough.

I have had no issues since intalling two 50W resistors each side. I have not installed LEDs in the front, so maybe a snafu will rear its ugly head yet. *knocking on wood*. Thanks to this forum and YouTube, my smoked tail lights with LEDs look and work great. See below for how I mounted the resistors. Sorry for the sideways pic. Don't know how to rotate here. Looks like default is for landscape....