LED strips under doors - 12 months on.

[azeeroth]

I've had some ebay LED strips under the doors on my Yaris for about a year or so now, and I'm changing them out for a different colour and adding more lights so I thought I'd take some shots and let people know how they're holding up. If you've thought of doing this yourself then you should do it. They hold up really well to the weather etc!

I bought ones like this
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/30CM-15-L...item1e6d995398
30cm SMD LED's. They're painfully easy to wire up and I hooked them up to the wiring for the cabin lights so they come on with those and dim out after the time is up. Very cool from outside the car too because they switch on when you unlock it with the remote!

They have self adhesive backing, but to keep the wires neat and safe I put regular household clear packing tape over them. A year of driving in hot Queensland summers, rainy mid seasons and mild winters and the tape is still in great shape, comes off clean and easy in one piece. The self adhesive backing left some residue though, just the sticky stuff. Some degreaser and a cloth and it came off after five minutes....


This is the new strips and the old. The old one is at the top, and even though it was in the door sill it's still in good condition. Still works, it's just white and I want to move to blue which is the bottom two.


Two new strips installed.

I ran wires from in the cabin through to the doors basically following the wiring for the power windows. I then dropped the cables inside the door frames and wiggled a short piece of wire in one of the drainage holes on the bottom of the door until I caught the wires. Be careful doing that because there's more wires in the door than the ones you need, but I was patient and it worked fine. I then ran those cables back to the fusebox and hooked it up to the circuit for the interior lights. All info found in this excellent forum of course!

This is the light it puts out when you open the doors.


Wobbly shot of the car doors with the lights on


Now with extra Jack Russell! This is how the light looks with the doors closed - it makes a really great star/dot pattern in the gap of the door. Looks good with the blue lights on the blue car.


You can sort of see the blue star effect here a bit better. It's hard to photograph with my phone instead of breaking out the DSLR