GE Nighthawk headlight bulbs, any good?

PhantomOG

Anyone have experience with GE Nighthawks? I was looking to replace some old dim headlights and stumbled across these for cheap on Amazon. Right now, they are buy one get one free instantly, with a mail-in-rebate also available. I got a pair of these for $19.99 shipped and will send in for the $5 rebate. So $7.50 a pop. The offer is good for twin packs as well.

I hope they are good... if they are not, I'm only out a few bucks.

nadams

Just keep in mind a few things-

The brighter the light, the faster they burn out.
A bright light won't help if it's trying to get through cloudy, cracked lenses.
Don't touch the glass on the bulb!

PhantomOG

nadams wrote: »

Just keep in mind a few things-

The brighter the light, the faster they burn out.
A bright light won't help if it's trying to get through cloudy, cracked lenses.
Don't touch the glass on the bulb!

Yep. I was looking at the silverstars but everyone claimed they burned out too fast. These are rated at 150/800 hours. They were so cheap I couldn't pass them up.

Last weekend I bought one of those headlight cleaning kits at the auto parts store. It made an amazing difference in the lenses. They look brand new. I still wasn't happy with the brightness of the lights so I decided to try new bulbs next.

nadams

Cool, glad to see you covered the bases already. Let us know how you make out with these... I've heard nothing about them at all. From working at Autozone I have negative experience with the silverstars.

brettw22

If they are rated much higher wattage or brightnes, they're going to bake your lenses over time. I had gone with the "HID Replacement" bulb and within a few months was looking through clouded lenses because the high heat cooks them and once they cloud over like that from the inside, you need a new light housing cuz bulb replacements won't do squat. I also had wire heating issues because they were taking so much more juice and the harness almost melted........

All I'm saying is be careful with these aftermarket super bulbs, especially if your lenses are already starting to cloud up.........

F1nut

I had one wiring harness cook after installing "aftermarket" bulbs. I had it replaced, removed the bulbs and went back to stock.

PhantomOG

hmmm... didn't look at the wattage. Looking now, I see the nighthawks I bought are 67/60 while it seems OEM replacements are 60/55. Not too much higher, hopefully it will be ok. I see some bulbs as high as 100/80 being sold as replacement parts.

heiney9

nadams wrote: »

Cool, glad to see you covered the bases already. Let us know how you make out with these... I've heard nothing about them at all. From working at Autozone I have negative experience with the silverstars.

So what do you recommend. I'm not nec looking for higher wattage. I'm looking for brighter more white light.

I have the typical Hella halogen series in an 11 year old car with true glass lenses. They use a 2 bulb system with a seperate bulb for brights. I's also like to upgrade my driving lights to the same type of bulb I use for the headlights

I just need a bulb that will fit in the factory position that has a brighter characteristics. The bulbs I use now are very yellow and don't project all that well compared to the newer bulb/projector assemblies.

Not looking to spend $1K for HID conversions.

H9

WilliamM2

heiney9 wrote: »

So what do you recommend. I'm not nec looking for higher wattage. I'm looking for brighter more white light.

I have the typical Hella halogen series in an 11 year old car with true glass lenses. They use a 2 bulb system with a seperate bulb for brights. I's also like to upgrade my driving lights to the same type of bulb I use for the headlights

I just need a bulb that will fit in the factory position that has a brighter characteristics. The bulbs I use now are very yellow and don't project all that well compared to the newer bulb/projector assemblies.

Not looking to spend $1K for HID conversions.

H9

I've had great results with the Sylvania Silverstone bulbs in both my cars and my bike. Much whiter and brighter light, yet they are standard wattage. No worries about melting plastic or wiring harness.

Seem to last as long as regular bulbs, at least none have burned out in the 3 vehicles I have them in. They were installed in 2003.

FA - Q

-for H-4 applications...

-the best/ safest ive used to date are H4-Xexons

-whoopers, sorry 'Xenon' gas filled

shawn474

I bought two sets of the silverstars and neither lasted a month. I was very disappointed with the longevity of these for how much they cost. I won't buy them again, but am going to try these nighthawks now due to the amazon deal.

Jstas

I'm running Silverstars at all 4 locations plus my corner lights on my truck and I have had no blow outs except for one due to a broken foglight housing. These lamps have been in the truck for 4 years running now. I'm suspecting I'm hitting their life span soon and I'll likely replace them with more Silverstars.

As far as the high wattage info goes, sorry nadams but it's not true. Higher heat, yes but higher wattage, no. Smaller headlight housings don't bleed off heat as well as bigger ones. I have 6 inch fog lamps with H4 bulbs and 9007's in projection buckets almost 8 inches around for main headlights. I have plenty of air space to dissipate the heat off the Silverstars without a problem.

For those of you using the "HID Replacement" bulbs, unless you are installing stepping transformers and ballast resistors with those bulbs, you're getting swindled in to a bogus bulb that just has wattage ratings too high for the housing they are installed in. In addition, HID light is vastly different from standard halogen or xenon bulbs which use filaments. If you have a high wattage bulb like the 110/80 mentioned above, by federal standards, they are illegal. They are for off-road use only and the wattages are limited to 70/55 or 70/60 depending on the year of the vehicle. Also, you can only have a white or yellow(amber) light. No blue lights.

The HID lights are outside of this realm because of the housing and lens design, not the light source. Thee HID lights last forever because there is no filament to burn out. They work by jumping an arc across two electrodes in a gas filled chamber. This is, essentially, lightning in a bottle. However, an HID light produces something like 350% more light than the standard halogen lamp. This requires a bucket and lens design that the focuses the light in certain areas and keeps beam direction down and out of the eyes off oncoming traffic.

HID lamps have gotten much better in recent years and it's difficult to tell when a car actually has them now. But HID lamps use a much higher power level than a conventional bulb hence the need for special equipment. That special equipment also produces a bluish glow at the extremes of the output due to the bucket and lens diffraction making a small amount of the blue and violet spectrum visible in the same way that the sky looks blue.


For those of you looking for more output, check you local motor vehicle laws to make sure that what you are about to buy is road legal. Just because it's sold as an aftermarket and/or OEM replacement doesn't mean it is road legal. There are specific requirements to power levels, color of light and so on. If the bulb doesn't fit the laws, you can get a fix-it ticket or an impound if the cop is particularly pissy. Don't expect the packaging to tell you it's legal or not. Most manufacturers can get away with not labeling the packaging because while there are Federal minimums, the laws vary from state to state on what an off-road use is and so on.

And blue lights are the worst to use for driving mainly because your eye is tuned to recognize blue the least and your eye is less effective at focusing on blue lights. It leads to eye strain and fatigue which is not good for driving. What color does your eye tune to the best? Yellow. White is a close second.

As far as a recommendation, I haven't used what the OP posted so I can't comment but I like the Silverstars and will recommend them. I will also recommend the Hella and PIAA brands although they are quite a bit more expensive.

Jstas

Clarification on the wattage stuff.

Higher wattage will cause extra heat in the wiring harness and that is not good. High wattage on the filament will not cause pre-mature burnout if the bulb is installed properly in a housing with enough airspace to handle the added heat. Some modern headlight housings and quite a few older ones too are tight, projector beam housings that do not allow heat to dissipate quickly and it builds up. The added heat increases the heat levels in the housing and the bulb and that causes pre-mature failure. It's not necessarily the fault of filament failure due to higher wattage. If the filament was too small for the wattage, the bulb wouldn't last more than a couple hours, maybe even a couple of minutes before becoming excessively bright and then failing.

There is actually a standard for a bulb design that gives wattage ratings based on filament thickness and material and also what gas the filament performs best in. I remember seeing the charts in college in my EE classes but, if I can find the books, the equations are quite simple to figure out filament thickness for a given material.