Thank you
@percolated ... I try to research or test things above and beyond sometimes lol
As far as the tail lights I am not 100% sure since I didn't replace those but it would make sense if the same concept applies. If you have a pre-LP, chances are it will not be as "problematic" as the LP, but you never know.
If you want to run some tests and have a voltmeter available and a couple basic tools, you could figure out how much wattage is used and this will give you an idea of what type of LED bulbs to get since there are several types/brands that produce anywhere from 1 up to 2-3 watts, especially for the tail lights, there are some bulbs that are much more powerful than the regular license plate/ dome light bulbs which is what you need in order to avoid the error if your car is as sensitive as mine.
This is how I did it: You need a voltmeter, a 12v power source (I used a cigarette lighter connector that I can plug in the wall and provides 12V, but you can also use a car battery or even a 12v drill battery), a wire/cable, a calculator and of course the OEM and LED bulbs.
NOTE: do this at your own risk, it should be perfectly safe, this is just how I did it, I am not an electrician and or expert at all.
See attached image to give you a better visual on how to wire the "jig"
You gotta set your voltmeter to where that green circle is and put your positive probe in the "10a" connector, normally it goes on the opposite side where I put a white "X" in the picture.
Once you have that set, you have to find your 12v power source and wire the NEGATIVE side with any thin wire you have laying around, it could be a speaker wire or anything similar to that, at this point it doesn't really matter because it is just a temporary test but make sure you use the correct gauge wires if you are planning on doing anything to your car. Then, the positive probe of your voltmeter will go on the positive side of your power supply. The negative wire will have to make contact with one of the sides of your bulb and the black probe will have to make contact with the other side of the bulb.
Do not put the probe and the wire on the same side of the bulb because this will create a spark, since you would be wiring the + and - side of the battery all together. Note: the black probe will be your "positive" even though it is "black", it is supplying the + power that the red probe is getting from your 12v power supply.
The number you will see on the screen once you have your bulb connected needs to be multiplied by 12 and this should give you a very good idea of the wattage of the bulb.
When I ran my tests, this is what I found out when I tested one of the many festoon LED bulbs I bought vs the OEM one (license plate lights):
The number you see there is the milliamps (sorry if I am wrong about the terms, this is not my field), and what you need to do in order to obtain the bulb wattage is to multiply that number by the power source voltage, which in this case is 12v. I know that the car supplies a little more than 12v, especially when it is running (about 13-14V) but just to be safe I always used 12v because I didn't want to get a "bulb warning light" if the car was not running and the key was in the "on" position... just my OCD being annoying, lol.
So, in the picture above we can see that the OEM bulb is showing .31 mA and that x 12v = 3.72watts (with the car/alternator running is somewhere around 4watts or 8watts since the license plate light uses TWO bulbs) and the LED bulb is .11 x 12 = 1.32watts, and maybe somewhere around 1.4watts when the car is running. I knew right away that even by having 3 led bulbs of that type it would still throw a code. Three of those bulbs would be roughly 4watts and the computer/car needed to read at least 5.1watts. I figured that out by testing so many bulbs that all together and/or combined added the right amount of wattage until the error was no longer showing up in my dash, which is somewhere around 5.1watts for the license plate lights, but a simple way or starting point would be just unplugging 1 bulb and seeing if the code pops up, and if it does, you can replace just that one bulb with an LED one and see if the error goes away, then you will start doing your math and figure out what wattage is needed to avoid the error. For my license plate lights I used 2 bulbs that were showing .19ma and for my 3rd bulb I just used the one in the picture that is showing .11ma. All 3 bulbs I used produce 5.88watts all together, more than enough to avoid error codes.
I believe you have to remove the tail lights to access the bulbs. So, if you don't really want to go thru the "hassle" of figuring out what type of LED bulbs to get and/or adding an additional bulb to being able to reach the needed wattage in order to avoid any errors; what you can do is install a ballast resistor that will provide you with enough wattage to avoid any errors, even if you use a super "Weak" led bulb, the resistor will take care of the rest but you just have to know which resistor to get! Since your tail lights will be out when you replace the bulbs, there has to be a metal surface anywhere inside there that will let you mount the resistor on a safe surface away from any plastics and or wires (this is very important because those resistors get EXTREMELY HOT and can melt stuff around them, that is why in my case I decided to add an extra led bulb and hide it behind my bumper instead of having a super hot resistor in there)
This youtube video will give you a very good idea on how to set up a resistor (in this particular case they added it to the blinker light)
Hope this helps!! Cheers!
