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Electronic Flashers

Fixing LED Hyper Flash - How to find out if you have a replaceable flasher unit

One of the most common problems when replacing stock filament bulbs with LED bulbs in most vehicles is hyper flashing or bulb out warnings. For safety reasons, most vehicles use either of these methods to tell the driver that a bulb somewhere on the car has burned out.

How does the car know that there is a bulb out?

There is a part in the vehicle that controls when to hyper flash or show a warning. It's called a flasher unit. Each vehicle's flasher unit is designed to monitor the electrical load that it is powering. This means that the flasher unit knows how much current your car's factory bulbs will draw when they're in use. It monitors the vehicle's left/right circuit or monitors all 4 bulbs independently.

When one of the bulbs is burnt out, removed, or replaced with a lower wattage bulb/LED, the flasher will flash at double the normal rate on the side where the load has been removed.

How do you prevent the car from hyper flashing?

The solution is to either replace the flasher unit in your vehicle or add enough load back onto the system to trick the electrical system into thinking that nothing has changed. Correcting hyper flash or bulb out warnings when you upgrade is relatively easy once you understand what needs to be done.

Replaceable Electronic Flasher

Step 1: Find out if your vehicle has a replaceable electronic flasher

Every vehicle is different, so the easiest way to find out if yours has a replaceable electronic flasher is to do a Google search first. If you can't find information online, then you have to test the vehicle. To test, turn on the hazard switch. You will now hear a clicking sound from under the dashboard. If you don’t hear clicking but more of a fake blinker sound, your car most likely does not have a replaceable flasher unit. The sound will be coming from a small speaker located in the instrument cluster controlled by a computer. In some cars, the flasher unit is built into the HAZARD switch itself; feel the switch. Do you feel it clicking?

If your car does NOT have the sound coming from a speaker or does NOT have the flasher built into the hazard switch, reach up under the dash and start feeling around. The clicking will be accompanied by a tapping that can be felt in the frame of the dash. It will be noticeable but may be hard to locate. If this is the case, you may need to remove the lower dash covering to access the flasher unit. The flasher will usually look like the picture on the right, but there are quite a few variations. Once you locate the flasher, unplug it. The hazard lights should stop working. If they continue, you have the wrong part. Re-install it and continue the search.

Step 2: Find out how many contacts your flasher has and order replacement

After you find the flasher unit, you need to note how many contacts it has. Some have 2 or 3. Others have 5 or 8. You need to know this so you can compare them to the parts we have listed on our website. As mentioned before, we don't know what part will work in every car, only the cars we have first-hand experience with. So compare yours to what we have available and see if we have a match. Once you have found a match, order from our website with your LED order and install when you install your LED bulbs. This process should take a novice about 30-40 minutes to get done. It is fairly easy to do on most cars and is plug-n-play, requiring no tapping or splicing.

 

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