I've had a lot of time to think lately, as I've been driving back and forth to the hospital once or twice a day to visit one of my relatives. I really need some driving lights, as I'm now living out in the sticks and a lot of of the roads are mostly winding and DARK. I had a couple of other ideas, but I don't have time to work on them right now.

Assuming I would have to incorporate a relay to facilitate direct connection to the battery, why couldn't I have the low beam lights come on (or stay on) along with the high beams ? The low beam bulbs would provide just as much light as adding driving lights (more if I upgrade the bulbs).

Any reason this wouldn't work ?

['97 w/composite lights]

 

Interesting. I havent looked at any wiring diagrams but my first thought would be that you would still have to install a switch and a relay to power up the high beams separately to bypass the high/low beam switch.
Do I make sense, or should I just get some sleep?

 

You can just pull off the high beam wire for the relay trigger. If you want maximum brightness (not necessarily life) out of your headlights, a dual relay setup should be used, one for highs and one for lows. This will also add life to the switches in the dash as they won't be flowing as much current. I was going to do this on my old Intrepid, but sold it before I could get to it. I have all of the parts to make it happen. I was going to use factory plugs and make it plug-n-play so that if a relay blew in the middle of the night and I didn't have another one, I could just unplug it, plug back in factory and go on.

 

I thought of doin' the SAME damn thing.... I'll look into it and see... I'll do some current measurements and see what we're dealing with here and also see if the autoparts place might have a single relay that'll do what we want... might be able to find a double throw double pole relay that'll do what we want

 

Only problem is that you want the lows to function as normal and just the highs to have the lows on as well. A DPDT relay will throw them both on correct...

 

I was thinking of leaving the lows wired as they are, and splicing into the line between the switch and the highs, wiring in a relay, and running power to both the lows and highs. So the lows would remain the lows, but when you switched to the highs, you would get both.

That way, if the relay did fail, you could default back to the lows.

 

no a dpdt switch would have 6 pins going like...... 1 2 3 and then another row below it of 4 5 6 this is not including the energizing coil wire (switch wire)

the feed in (not the switch wire) would be put onto pins 2 and 5 then you'd put lows on like say 1 and then the highs and lows on 3 and 6 so what'd happen here is when relay flipped in one direction pins 1 and 4 would be tied to your 2 and 5 (nuttin' on 4 though) so only the lows would come on tied to pin 1 then flipped in other direction pin 3 and 6 would be tied to pins 2 and 5 turning on both high and low beams

 

Ah yeah... Sorry, I was thinking of a DPST relay.

That should work good

 

This place has kits to have all four headlights on when your high switch is engaged, but are rather pricey when a simple relay should suffice, as long as it's heavy-duty enough:

Stylinconcepts

BTW, I picked up a pair of 9006CBs (Cool Blues) to replace my OEM lows. I know these aren't as good as the better bulbs around, but I got them dirt cheap, for $5.49 each.