Questions on hooking up driving lights?

[Jason94sport]

I have a set of el-cheapo off road lights. You know the ones, 100W H3 bulb, round with that black protection grill. Anyway, I'm finally wiring them up this week. I have the switch mounted, the reley mounted, the lights mounted, & a bunch of wires. The instruction say to plug the lights into the reley, plug a wire from the switch to the rely, plug another wire from the switch to the relay, then hookup the ground on the switch, then splice a wire into either the low beams, or high beams. Question is which one would be better. My last truck had the fog lights from the factory wired so if I had the high beams on it would turn off the fog lights. And what wires are what. Which wire do I tap into for the low beams, or high beams.
Thanks

 

[mattadams]

you don't have to use your hi beam OR your lo beam, you can use any power source. Heck you could splice em into your cigarette lighter wire and they'd come on at anytime. I personally have mine spliced into the radio so anytime the vehicle is turned on the lights can be on.

 

[Jason94sport]

So do I need to hook that wire up? The reley aready has a wire going to the battery.

 

[mattadams]

you do have to hook it up to something or the lights won't work. Hypothetically though you could hook that wire up to the battery as well.

 

[Jason94sport]

Well, I'll think I'll wire it to the lowbeams. Which wire is that? What color is it?

 

[mattadams]

Well you'll have three wires going to your headlights, one black, one with stripes and one that is solid with stripes. As I recall its the one without the stripes, but best bet would be to splice it temporarily and see if that does the trick, if its the right one go ahead and permanently splice it in or if not, go to the other wire.

 

[Bill Kemp]

If they are driving lights and you want them on with the high beams ONLY hook the to the high beams. If you want them on only with the low beams ONLY hook them to the low beams.
On at any time hook them to a switched power source such as the raido or windshield wiper hot wire.

 

[fixer]

just to confuse things, you could use a 3 position switch so the lights could be;
on with either the hi or lo beams (you might want fogs to only be on with the low beams, or driving lights to only be on wiht the high beams.
off
either always on or on when the ignition is on

there is also a wiring mod to have both the high and low beams on at the same time... which would complicate things a little bit if you wanted your additional lights to only be on with hi or low.

depending on how you wired them, you could have fogs and lows on and switch to hi and driving when you flashed the brights.


hope this all makes sense, it's 1:30 am and almost time for bed.

 

[fixer]

simple wiring schematic

http://catalog.com/susq/other/auxlamps.htm

 

[Blue Steel]

what you could do is get a fuse block have a toggle switch to switch power on and off to the fuse block and run all your switch power wires to the fuse block. I did that, so all my offroad lights can be shut off with one switch. saves me from leaving some on. if you want me to explain it in greater detail, let me know

 

[Jason94sport]

Thanks for the info, but I do not like messing with this stuff as it is. I do not know alot about wiring stuff like this. So I'll just keep it simple.

 

[Blue Steel]

hey i didn't know anything about wiring either. it surprised me how simple it was. kinda like the torsion twist. that's an easy thing to do too. keeping it simple though is best, less things to break down