LED Clearance or Side Marker Trailer Light w/ Reflector - 1 Diode - Black Base - Red Lens

Video Transcript for Optronics LED Clearance or Side Marker Trailer Light with Reflector Review

Hi there, RV and trailer owners. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Optronics LED side marker and clearance lights. These are available in either red or amber in either a one or a three-LED configuration. We're going to be showing off the one diode in the red today, and we'll be showing off the three diode in the amber. If you get the one diode, it's not going to be quite as bright of an illumination as the three diodes, but it is going to draw a little bit less current. So you just got to factor that in if having too much current is a real big issue of yours, you might want to consider the single diodes, but if you're going for the all-out brightness, I'd recommend the three diodes.Amber lights are designed for your side and front clearance marker lights, whereas red marker lights are designed for the rear of your trailer or RV.

You can see all the lights here at the back of our motor home and trailer are red. The lens is also a reflector, so it does act as a multi-purpose. You have your illumination for when you have your lights on, when you have your tail lights on, and you do also have a reflector for during the day, and other things, people will be able to see you, to increase your visibility. And just like the red light, the amber shares all the same features, that the lens is a reflector. The LEDs are amber in color behind the lens.

These lights are DOT-compliant, and it is important you have them in the proper location to maintain DOT compliance with your trailer.Now, this is a brand-new trailer here. There was nothing wrong with the customer's original lights, but he has upgraded to LED lights because you do get a lot of benefits out of it. One is that LEDs are going to be brighter than your incandescent, so it'll have a little bit better illumination. People will be able to see him better at night. They also last about 50 times longer than an incandescent, so this bulb here is going to fail in this life of this trailer at some point.

So with the extended life, you don't have to worry about ever getting in here and maintaining this one, whereas this one here, you're likely going to have to throughout the life of your trailer.Another benefit is that LEDs draw less current than incandescent bulbs. What this means is that your battery is going to be under less load when going down the road. So, if your truck's trickle charging your battery and you've got a bunch of lights on, there's a good chance your truck is really just powering the lights and you're not charging up your battery, or even maintaining it. If you swap it out to more efficient LEDs, you're going to have more available there to be able to trickle charge that battery if necessary. And if you want to have more lights and add it to your trailer, you can add more LEDs and still stay at a lower wattage cap than you would with incandescents.These are surface-mount lights that measure 2" by 4".

It is a pretty standard size. The holes that mount it are also at a standard width that works with most of your trailers. If you follow along with us, we'll show you how to get it installed, and you'll see that it is basically a direct replacement for our existing light.Now our red and our amber lights are going to install the same. The only differences between them is that on the red lights here, the wiring on the back for the new lights are going to have a white and a red wire with the red being positive, and the ambers are a white with a black wire, with the black being the positive.To remove our old light, we're first going to pop the lens cover off. We're just using a small flat-bladed screwdriver. There's some little grooves there that you can get it in to pry it off of there. You can see the old incandescent light there. We'll then take a Phillips screwdriver, or you could use a square bit, to remove the screws there.Next, we need to break the sealant all the way around. On a lot of the motor homes, they don't have sealant down towards the bottom, so you can fit a small trim panel tool in there. Just kind of work it under there and then pop it out, and then just kind of work it around to break the sealant all the way around. We can then grab our wiring and we'll pull these out. It's usually easiest to do it one wire at a time. And if we look here, this is actually pretty tight, so just be careful when pulling on your wires. If they feel too tight then you may not be able to pull it any further and you'll just have to cut right here as it is, which is looking like what we may have to do here on this one, because this is pretty tight. You can also use your screwdriver to assist you getting the wires popped out of there, because these large caps on them do kind of make it difficult sometimes to get the wires pulled out. And then there we go. We got them pulled out.Now we can see we've got multiple wires going into the cap here, so we're going to be cutting the black wires here and then crimping our light onto these, so that way we don't ruin the multiple connections that are made there. One of the things you do need to know though, since we're switching over to LED lights, is which one is positive and which one is negative. I've already tested our lights on this trailer, and I know that the green one is positive and the white one is negative, but you could test this out using a test light or a volt meter. A volt meter is my preferred method because if we take it and we check our voltage, if we're reading it correctly, with the positive lead, we'll get a positive number. If we've got it backwards, we'll get a negative number.I've gone ahead and plugged in my tester. You could also plug in your truck. And we turned on the tail lights, because we need the power to be back here in order to properly check the voltage. I've got my positive lead, which is the red. We're going to grab the green wire there and poke it in. And then the black wire, which is our ground. And we can see there, we've got about 11.5 volts and it's a positive number, which means that the positive is hooked into the positive wire. If you we're to reverse those, it's not going to hurt your meter, but you'll see there, we do have a negative number now, which indicates that our leads are hooked up backwards. We've got our negative on our positive wire.If you we're using a test light, if you can find a good ground on a lot of your regular trailers, that should be easy to find one. On your motorhomes, sometimes it can be harder to find a good ground. But then you could just take your test light, hook it to ground, and then poke it in the wires here on the other end, and whichever one illuminated them has to be the positive wire, since you're hooked your ground on the other side. So now that we know these, we're going to go ahead and turn everything off because we don't want to have live wires when we're working with it.Now, before we swap out the light, I do like to get the sealant out of the way, because once you cut the wires to the light, there is a chance that these could suck back in there. So, the longer you leave the light on there, the less chance you have of that happening. You can use a plastic scraper to get these off of here. We're just using a trim panel tool that we've taken the edge to over on the bench grinders to make it a little sharper. They do make plastic razor blades. Those also work very well for getting stuff like this off without damaging the paint surface. And we don't need to get a hundred percent of this off. We just want to get the bulk, majority of it off. There's going to be a little bit, traces behind that's just going to be on there, and it's just going to take way too long to get it off of there. It's not going to make much of a difference.We've got that cleaned up. We're now going to grab our wires. We're going to go ahead and cut those. Make sure you leave enough length to where you can easily make your connections. I also like to, before I cut these, grab the wires with my hand, and that way it can't suck back in there, because you want to just kind of feel it inaudible 00:06:47 sometimes they just want to drop right back in there on you. so, it looks like these guys are going to cooperate with us pretty well, so they're not going to go back in there.We'll then strip back the ends here, and on each of these, we can crimp a butt connector. If you we're working on a regular trailer where your wires are going to be exposed to the elements, I would recommend a heat shrink butt connector instead, as that will shrink around the wires and seal it up to protect it against the elements. Since ours is going to be inside the trailer's wall here, it's going to be protected, so we're just using regular butt connectors. You can get either of those here at etrailer.Here we've got our new light. Now, what I do want to do is grab our old one real quick. You can see it's got a gasket here on the back. If you have anything like that, I recommend transferring it over. We're just going to peel that off the back of our old light and then we'll slide it on our new one, and now we'll just start making our connections. Red is positive, and if you we're working with the amber lights, it would be a black wire that would be positive. We're just going to crimp that right onto the other butt connector here. You can see that's going to our green wire, which is positive. We've got our white wire here, which is our ground, so that's going to hook to our white wire. Regardless of amber or red, it's going to be white for ground.Now that we've got our connection made, we can pop our lens cover off, poke our wires back in, and then using the same screws that we had removed, we'll just reattach it right back to the wall. We can now re-install our lens cover, and this is a good point to test everything out. We are going to be sealing it back up, but you don't want to have to seal it up, break the seal again, if you have an issue. So we'll plug in our tester or your truck, and once again, just make sure everything's working properly.We can see here, our light illuminates just fine. Everything's looking good. So we've got our amber ones replaced as well. Now, we'll go back and seal them up. We're now going to use some silicone here to seal it up. I'm going to go all the way around it. If you need some silicone, you can get some here at etrailer. We do offer it in white, gray or black. We are using clear today because it's the best match in color for our customer's motorhome here.So we're just running it around the outside and then we'll use our finger to clean it up once we've got it all the way run around. We're just getting a nice bead around it, just to make sure we've got enough there to work with. And then you can just take your finger here, and if you just run it around the edge, we can take the excess, and I just wipe that on a napkin as I'm smoothing it out. And then anything around the outsides, we'll just wipe that away as we're smoothing it out. All right.Once you've got your light sealed up and you're satisfied with the look, you'll repeat that process on any remaining lights. And that completes our look at Optronics LED marker and clearance lights..