When your stock halogen foglights inevitably die on you, you have an important decision to make. You can either replace them with new halogens and continue the cycle of dealing with burnt out foglights every few years, or you can upgrade to a pair of our LED foglight bulbs. We have spent years developing our LED lighting solutions and are proud to offer the best solution in LED foglight bulbs, the SL1 and SLF.
Here at Diode Dynamics, we are dedicated to providing the best automotive LEDs in the industry. Since we opened our doors in 2006, we have been working to offer the best LED bulbs on the market. Unlike many other brands, we are not just importing bulbs from overseas to resell. We design, manufacture, and test our foglight bulbs at our facility in St. Louis. Click here to learn more: Making LED Bulbs in USA! SL1 Foglight Bulbs Video
What makes our foglight bulbs different is the fact that we designed our bulbs from the ground up. We looked at all of the top selling LED bulbs on the market and realized that in order to produce a superior product, we had to think outside the box. Our team of engineers took a look at every facet of our bulbs so we could create an LED bulb that most closely matches the fit and function of an OEM halogen, but with a vastly superior output.
Stock halogen bulbs are designed to have a limited lifespan. These bulbs operate using a heated tungsten filament, similar to a conventional household bulb. This filament is encased in an enclosed compartment filled with a halogen gas. As the tungsten heats, it will begin the evaporate. The evaporated tungsten reacts with the halogen to form a halide salt which, as it approaches the hot filament, breaks down and redeposits the tungsten on the filament. This process, known as a halogen cycle, decreases the lifespan of the bulb. Because the tungsten will not be redistributed evenly, the filament will eventually get too thin and break.
Unlike halogen bulbs, LEDs are extremely efficient. Instead of relying on a heated filament to produce light, LEDs use a special form of semiconductor known as a diode. Light-Emitting-Diodes (LEDs) use a special material containing atoms that are missing electrons, resulting in a net positive charge. Electrons introduced to the diode can only move in one direction and will naturally want to fill the electron holes in the positively charged area of the diode. As electrons move into these holes, they have to release some of their energy in the form of light. Unlike heating a filament, the process of moving electrons into these holes is very energy efficient, allowing more light to be produced while using significantly less power.
Our SLF and SL1 LEDs are the best LED foglight bulbs on the market. After years of working with LEDs, we put all of our industry knowledge into creating these bulbs. Our bulbs are simple to install, offer an incredible output, and will last as long as 40 sets of halogen bulbs. Competitors may boast about their high lumen outputs, but our bulbs actually work with your foglight assembly to emit light in the same pattern as the halogen bulb, only much brighter.
SLF LED Foglight Bulb
The issue with many aftermarket LED bulbs has to do with the positioning of their LED chips. Your foglight reflectors were designed to work with the halogen bulbs your car originally came with. This means that all of the internal reflectors are oriented to reflect light originating at the point where the halogen bulb’s tungsten filament would sit. In order to produce a focused output using LEDs bulbs, the diodes have to be as close to this filament position as possible. Because the bulbs feature a diode on each side of the main board, we have designed our boards to be as thin as possible to mimic the halogen filament location.
Our bulbs offer incredible output. Many companies will brag about their lumen output, but without proper focus, this number means very little. Because of their wide construction, this high output they claim will not create a focused beam of light. To put it bluntly, the brightness of your bulbs means next to nothing unless the spacing is as close as possible to the halogen filament your foglight's system was designed to reflect.
This idea can be tricky to grasp, so imagine trying to bounce a ball off of a wall. If you throw it at a 45 degree angle towards the wall, it will deflect off of the wall and its departure vector will also be 45 degrees. For the sake of this example, this 45 degree angle of departure is what you want. Now you try to throw the ball at a 30 degree attack vector, but it will not leave the wall at the same 45 degree departure vector. Instead it will deflect 30 degrees from the wall as it departs. It is simply impossible to achieve the 45 degree departure angle you want when you’re starting with a 30 degree attack angle. Changing the size of the ball you are throwing will not change the angle of deflection. The ball is your light, the wall is your foglights’ reflectors, and the size of the ball is your light output. If you can’t get the angles right, the amount of light your bulbs are emitting will not fix the issue of focusing the light at the correct angles.
Our SLF and SL1 bulbs have the thinnest spacing between diodes of any LED foglight bulbs on the market. This thin profile allows our bulbs to interact with your foglight reflectors just like a halogen filament. Our LED chips will emit light at the desired angles and create a focused beam pattern that will shine brighter and further than a stock bulb. Trying to use bulkier chips might output more light, but that light will become heavily diffused due to the fact that it is not reflecting at the right angles. So, when it comes to LED bulbs, brighter does not equal better.
While the output from our bulbs is powerful, it is focused and does not blind oncoming traffic. All of our LED foglight bulbs have DOT and SAE compliant light output in certain foglamp applications as tested. With our precise diode positioning, our SLF and SL1 bulbs will not produce a widely scattered glare that could blind other drivers. Instead, the light from your foglights will be focused down the road exactly where you need it.
Unlike many of our competitors, we do not produce bulky bulbs. We have kept our bulbs small in size so they are incredibly easy to install with no modification. Every bulb we sell is designed to fit into your vehicle with the same fitment tolerances as your OEM bulbs. Despite our bulbs’ small size, they remain incredibly cool. There are plenty of bulbs on the market with massive heat sinks and oversized fans. These designs often can make installation difficult. We developed a small, but incredibly effective, heatsink to draw heat away from the chips on our SLF and SL1 bulbs. Our more powerful SL1 even has a small bearingless fan then draws heat away from this heatsink. This design keeps our bulbs cooler than the competition, which will extend the working life of the bulbs.
Installing our bulbs is a simple plug and play process. The LED drivers are compact in size and are encased in a secure waterproof aluminum housing. Our bulbs use a boost-mode circuit in order to avoid thermal imbalance over time. This helps to avoid overheating and premature failure of the LED chips.
SL1 LED Foglight Bulb
Many replacement LED bulbs have difficulty interacting with circuitry designed for halogen bulbs, which can sometimes result in flickering. This is especially prevalent in vehicles using CAN-BUS systems. These systems help the components of your car interact without needing a central computer. Because LEDs draw less power than an OEM halogen, and the CAN-BUS system doesn’t know this, the difference in current can cause false errors or improper power distribution. This is what causes foglight flickering.
Our engineers looked at dozens of automotive electrical systems and added current monitoring circuitry to our drivers so your vehicle will read our SLF or SL1 LEDs as having the same power consumption as a stock bulb. This additional circuitry will help to avoid common CAN-BUS errors. Depending on your vehicle's make and model, it’s possible that these errors will still occur. If you experience these flickering issues, one of our Diode Dynamics CAN-BUS anti-flicker modules will solve the problem. If you are worried about how our bulbs will interact with your car’s electrical system, you can contact a member of our team using the contact information at the bottom of this page.
In addition to being designed to work perfectly with your vehicle, we have also tested our bulbs to make sure they can stand up to environmental factors. Our bulbs are built with solderless terminals and strain relieving wiring to avoid vibrations affecting their connection. The plastics used to construct our bulbs are the same resilient high-temperature PP-GF plastics used to make halogen bulbs. Once we were certain that every component was optimized to handle the heat and vibrations that naturally occur in cars, we put them through our state of the art environmental testing chamber. We cycled the bulbs between -40°F to 185°F several times to ensure that no matter what conditions they are exposed to, they will continue to shine for years to come.
While a standard halogen bulb will burn out after around 1000 hours of use, our SL1 and SLF LEDs are designed to last at least 40,000 hours. This exceptionally long lifespan means that our bulbs should be the last pair you’ll buy for your vehicle. Consider this: there are only 12 hours of darkness per day on average. If you needed to use your foglights every day for the full 12 hours of darkness, a halogen bulb would last you at most 3 months. Our SLF and SL1 bulbs would shine through every hour of darkness for 9 years. This is an extreme example and if you are not using them to illuminate every hour of darkness, our bulbs should last decades.
In addition to their incredible life expectancy, all of our LED foglight bulbs come with a three-year worry-free warranty. This warranty is meant to cover any unexpected issues that cause premature failure, but in our experience, our customers rarely have to return defective bulbs. Regardless, we are happy to provide our customers with a little extra peace of mind when they buy a set of our bulbs.
So if it's time for you to replace your foglight bulbs, consider making the change to our LED foglight bulbs. You can find the perfect bulb to fit your vehicle using our convenient vehicle finder tool. Once you find the correct bulbs, you can order directly from our website and install them yourself. You can also find an authorized dealer near you to order the bulbs and complete the installation for you. If you have any questions about our bulbs, you can reach a member of our team by phone at 314-205-3033 or by email at contact@diodedynamics.com.
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