[fintubi]

Happy New Year, everybody! Here's a summary of my experience with the Sylvania/Zevo LEDs that Bob posted at the top of the thread:

I installed a pair of them as the rear signal/parking lights in my slabside (ERA 3014), leaving the existing incandescent bulbs in the front positions. Of course, this is a rectangular taillight application.

My rear parking and brake lights worked fine after moving to the LEDs, but both rear LEDs would flash when signaling a turn. The offside LED was much dimmer than the side being signaled - about parking-light intensity, but of course still unacceptable on the road. The problem was the same when signaling either direction.

This was a pretty clear indication to me that the LED current draw characteristic was causing the trailer relay to misbehave. I found that a remarkably small parallel current fixed the problem: a 1K resistor on each side was sufficient, adding only 12mA to the ~120mA drawn by the LED.

The low current requirement is good news since no power resistors are needed - garden-variety 1/4W units are fine, one for each side. There are plenty of ways to rig this without altering ERA's harness, allowing the car can be reverted to "purist" configuration if needed.

My hypothesis is that the steady-state current drawn by the LEDs isn't what's fooling the relay, but rather their transient characteristics. Adding *some amount* of purely resistive load is what does the trick. Otherwise it would be surprising that just a 10% increase in current is enough to make the problem disappear. But no matter - fixed is fixed.

A few side notes:

- The trailer relay that came from ERA failed last year, and I replaced it with a Curt 58240, which appeared to be equivalent. All tests described above were conducted with that unit.

- I bought the flasher cited by Bob at the top of the thread, but everything described here worked the same with my original unit, which I'm keeping to preserve its audible click.

Bill