Xantia S1 - LED dashboard bulbs

[Xantidote]

Has anyone gone down this route or is it too much hassle?

I have 2 bulbs failed on the rev counter back-lighting which I can live with, but it has set me thinking, and Citroen charge nearly £3/bulb.

I've extracted a few small LEDs from old garden lights, typically 5mm diameter (probably the same in small torches?), and if the back part of the old plastic dashboard bulb holder is cut off, then these LEDs will push into where the old bulb was located. These LEDs, as do some LED torchs, operate on 3 - 4.5 volts, the voltage affecting the brightness, so I'm thinking 4 or 5 in series would work, in electrical terms. Not sure how bright/dim the lighting would be. Anyone tried this out?

Also, anyone know of a supplier of the LEDs, or is it a matter of cannibalising a few more garden lights or torches?

[c.morewood]

Let Me save you some time Martin.
I went down this road with my S2 a couple of months ago. They didn't work.
The only bulbs I kept were for the indicators, all the led's did was light up the captions on each side of what they should have been lighting up.
I got my leds off e bay .. 10 x White SMD Superbright T5-286 Dash Bulb they were the correct length but a flat head, but just didn't have the correct light path and scattered light at the back of the instrument cluster and although they were white they gave the red stoplight a distinctly pink glow.
hope this helps,
Chris

[Xantidote]

Thanks Chris,

That's very interesting & helpful. When you say they scattered light at the back of the instrument cluster, would they work for those bulb positions providing back-lighting to the rev counter and speedo? I think there may be 5 involved for this, and these were the ones I was thinking of replacing. I had expected there might be a problem with the light spread. The small ones I've been playing with seem to have their light concentrated on the "dead ahead" point, with much less scatter sideways.

I imagine more modern cars have dashboards designed to accept LEDs (and no doubt an LED failure would mean "Sorry Sir, a failed LED means we'll have to renew the whole dashboard")

Martin

[c.morewood]

Yes they would Martin, But .. isn't there always a but?
I found that because of the variation in light levels led's are a very, in my case, white light compared with the remaining yellow glow of the ordinary bulbs and I found the two levels of lighting not very nice..Interesting when you try to dim them at night as well..
I kept the led's for the indicators
1 because they're used more that the rest and those are the ordinary bulbs which should fail first and
2 my indicator has lost most of its click so the really bright led flashing away at me means I really can't accidentally leve the indicators on.
Chris

[Xantidote]

Well, an interesting exercise - not sure now that I'll go any further down the LED route. Thanks for your comments Chris, very useful. Think it's simplest to wait for a scrap Xantia to come along - not in a hurry anyway.

Interesting that in my later BoL, it says that "instrument panel fitted to Jan 1998 & later cars (facelift models) is of solid-state type, ie. that many of the illumination and warning light bulbs may not be renewable separately"

cheers - Martin

[c.morewood]

If I had a bit more patience and time Martin I might have tried different LED's not just the flat topped ones.. as it was I had the dash apart and together about 4 times sorting out the needle positions (and creating a how to take the dash apart and fix the speedo on the Mk2) http://www.frenchcarforum.co.uk/forum/v ... od#p321895" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
so after I discovered they didn't work as well as I'd hoped I just gave up on the idea.
Keep us posted as I'm sure if you do find a way of doing it there will be a few interested people on the forum.

Chris