Low beam Canbus compatible LED bubs - 2006 V70 Topic is solved

[scot850]

The previous owner of our car fitted LED bulbs to both the high beam and low beam headlights on our 06 V70. The apparently worked well for about a year or so but are now throwing a bulb code for the low beam bulbs. I want to rectify this issue as warning lights on on any of our cars make me very unhappy!

I have read several cases of using LED bulbs where you plug directly to the heatsink causing the harness to melt as the poor design ends up using the wiring harness as part of the heatsink to help cool them.

The current units fitted (no idea of brand) fortunately have the flying lead from the heatsink so the wiring looks ok with no signs of melting.

Has anyone done and LED swap and had good success with the swap and so far have warning light/messages not come on? If so how long since you fitted the bulbs?

If you have been happy with the bulbs you used (and have checked the connectors are not melting), please let me know the bulb brand and details.

I do find the difference between the 06 XC70 and the V70 headlights are huge. The V70 on LED's are significantly brighter v's the XC70 on standard bulbs.

Appreciate there are those for and against this type of swap for whatever reasons, but if there are any pros/cons I should be considering please let me know.

Thanks,

Neil.

[scot850]

I will need more time on this, but have been in contact with a Hella brand rep who lives locally and has offered to help find LED headlights that will work with our 06 V70. They will likely use a decoder in the wiring between the bulb and the lighting circuit to prevent setting off the bulb error light as it is doing now. It should not prevent the bulb failure light from notifying you if it fails, but just stop the flicker that LED's do that can cause self test systems to shout at you!

I am hoping to go visit him on Saturday and will update what I find then.

Was corresponding with another Canadian supplier with a lifetime warranty on their lighting. They claim their 45W 6000k white headlight bulbs are their most popular, but also claim they give 5X the amount of light that the standard Halogen bulb does. Yikes, and that is not a problem to other road users on low beams?? They do claim they have some proprietary design that prevents dazzle. 2 bulbs + decoders are over $300 CDN delivered with a lifetime warranty.

The Hella units are about 40% of that.

Neil.

[scot850]

I went to a specialist yesterday that I was linked to by Hella who lived just south of Calgary. He offered to fit the bulbs for free. I did warn him that access to the low beam lights is a bit of a challenge. He didn't seem to think so. Well guess who lost that argument (Hint: Not me!).

Anyway he tried accessing the bulbs but quickly realized that he was wrong. We ended up pulling the Airbox to get access to the LHS Low beam, and he was able to just get to the connector for the RHS, but not able to pull the bulb.

He first tested the original LED that was in the car with a special tester he had like a light box. That gave brightness as well as power draw by the bulb. Turns out the original LED my buddy fitted only gave a 0.9A draw in power and was basically only slightly brighter than what a standard halogen bulb should output. He did mention that all bulb manufacturers. overstate what their bulbs capabilities in terms of light output is. And this is what we found out. He also tried inline decoders that should reduce any flicker from the LED bulbs in case that was what was setting the error message. I should point out that the High beams do not trip a warning on the dashboard.

Well the decoder did not help wither or another magic box he tried (can't recall what it was). He then pulled a standard Halogen bulb from stock to see what it output and it turned out the 55W H11 bulb actually output 71W!! He tried another high end bulb this time that claimed 5X the (6k) brightness of a standard halogen. Not only did it not fix the issue, the car actually would not switch it on!!

He then looked for another bulb somewhere in the middle and found a white light 6K bulb that not only worked did not need any support to prevent a dashboard complaint message! He had been working for well over an hour by then, and we had only connected the RHS Low bean to the wiring harness and not actually fitted it. I told him to leave it as it may require pulling the bumper and removing the headlight to actually get my hands into the space. I'll get to that this week. maybe..............!

The bulbs were not cheap at $150 + Tax CDN, but they work well and don't set a warning so I'll be happy with that.

He also recommended leaving the High beam bulbs alone as they were working fine. Strangely it is a 9005 bulb (Handbook says it is a H9 65W bulb). The lighting is slightly more yellow than the Low beams but that is ok. We don't drive outside the city much at night anymore so that is just fine!

My mechanic buddy made me laugh as the wants to buy LED bulbs back as he is not bothered by the warning light. I will happily give them back as I have no need for them!

I will check the bulb brand and spec and post the info here in case it is of help to others wanting LED's and want some chance they will work on their P2 cars. I may try the same with the 00 R at some point. However, as the car is only driven over the summer months it is really not a priority.

Neil.

[yanga001]

Canbus compatible is a bit of a misnomer as these devices have no such communication on the leads. What is actually happening is that Volvo has a fairly advanced system for load sensing the lights and seeing if they have the right “load / resistance” to indicate that an incandescent bulb is there. LED’s by design are a much lower resistive load so they don’t register as a proper load on the system. What we can do is add load resistors in parallel if I recall correctly to trick the car into thinking that there is the correct bulb on the harness. One issue is that the load can change depending on temperature due to how resistors work. In my case I often had bulb out lights during the warmer months if I recall correctly.


Ford also uses this tech and a bunch of the American companies. I believe Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai of similar vintage just don’t register bulb out even on high end 60k cars.


Try looking up load resistors and see if you need to stack them. From examining wiring diagrams of these cars and others, “can bus decode” is just a fancy way to say it is trying to load match to a halogen bulb, there is no can communication between the bulb and the cars network.

[volvolugnut]

If you only want brighter headlights, Sylvania has a series of halogen headlight bulbs in various brightness and color. The brighter bulbs burn out sooner and cost more.
volvolugnut

[scot850]

The new LED's are working (well one is) or will be once I can get time to tackle fitting the RH one. Car access is a challenge just now and my wife has it away for the weekend. On it's return I will tackle this replacement and give an idea of light spread and brightness. Unfortunately I do not have the original set up as the car sis not come with halogens. I can though give the XC70 which is the same headlights on halogens.

Neil.

[scot850]

Sorry for the delay. Car access has been an issue as I wanted to make sure if something did not work I had time to resolve it without having the 'boss' breathing down my neck. So this week she is away so I decided to tackle replacing the 2nd LED Low-beam for the RHS.

I was not looking forward to this as I did not want to remove the bumper and headlight if possible. So my plan was to give myself more room to work with by removing the ECU/TCU and the box around them along with the filler neck for the windshield washer bottle.

I have an Amazon 'knock-off' tool which required a lot of reshaping to work but eventually I did.

The tool looks like this:

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/203840602505?ch ... R5FY5BrZJU

I used EBay as often Amazon.ca cannot always be viewed south of the border. Prices vary but most tools will likely work after bending them a little to keep the forks close to the sides of the ECU/TCU units. There are YouTube videos on the use of the tool. Be careful not to bend pins!

What I then found is another Volvo stupidity. Why give an access port on the rear of the headlight and offset the low-beam bulb to the RHS and up towards to top of the access hole?? I struggled to remove the previous LED bulb fitted by the previous owner but did eventually. I also had to use a mirror on a stick to see whare the bulb went

I had great difficulty fitting the new bulb as I could not get it to turn to lock in. Eventually I realized I was turning it the wrong way. Looking from the front of the car it has to turn CCW!

In fitting th ebulb, I had to untangle the spaghetti in the back of the light housing. In doing so I managed to pull the small marker light out. Not normally an issue, but the previous owner had fitted an oversize LED in there and the hole has a lip on the inside which pulled the bulb out of the holder and dropped it into the headlight!!!

I spent a fun packed 3 hours trying to fish it out. Eventually I removed the Hi-beam bulb and was able to get the bendy claw into the headlight and retrieve the bulb.

A stupid thing with the bulb. There is no clear orientation for the connector to the harness. Naturally I got it wrong. After connecting the other way around it worked (I had refitted the ECU/TCU but not the box around it). All good and no dash warning message!

Now whether this will last any more than the 12-18 months the previous owner said the last ones worked ok before throwing the bulb warning light we will have to wait and see. Light output is much better, this actually makes the yellow Hi-beam LED lights look weak.

Bulb details from the box are in the pictures below:

Brand name

Bulb type ID

Bulb type and rating is in orange

General info

If I were doing both headlight bulbs, I would likely just pull the bumper next time and save a lot of engineering language!

Hope this is of help.

Neil.

[EngineeringBloke]

On a road trip: MA - NC - NY - MA, about to head back from NY and got a head lamp out. Passenger side.

It's a pain, but I ran to Advance and got a Sylvania H11 to replace the Philips that I love.

I removed the washer filler pipe, the odd hose that clips to it, then remove the top and the side collar that surrounds the ECM and TCM. That gave me enough space to rotate, remove, unplug the old bulb and put in the new one, without removing the modules). All in a few minutes. I was so proud of myself. Lol (in the past, it's taken me way longer).