angrytoast
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- Jul 18, 2023
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- Location
- Mississippi
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- 2016 Civic EX-L
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I haven't really a lot of people talking about interior ambient lighting besides the OEM console lighting that's either stuck on red or blue and requires a stupid amount of work to install for very little effect or the cheap fiber optic lights that really don't look that good, so I thought I'd put this out there.
The little bit of stuff I've seen involves these cheap led lights that run through a bulky fiber optic tube that really doesn't function as advertised. During the day the light isn't really visible and at night, there's bright and dim spots all throughout the trim that just makes the whole thing look cheap and tacky. The kit I ended up running across is an acrylic strip with led lights running through the entire length which gets rid of the "hot spots" people tend to see and allows it to give off evenly distributed light that's visible in direct sunlight. The kits available on amazon are pretty much the same cheap Chinese things that all function pretty similarly and tend to stick around $80-$120 depending on the size of the kit and the seller. I wanted an 18 piece kit which comes with acrylic strips to go across the entire dash and all four doors as well as lights to illuminate the door handles, storage areas, and footwells which ran me about $100.
The installation wasn't complex but it required a bit of time and patience to pull the interior of the car apart and figure out a good way to run the wiring for the lights. I started with the dash which required pulling most of the trim loose but not completely off. I did have to disconnect the A/C controls and pull the head unit down to run the lights and wiring behind it. For the doors I had to pull the interior panels off and push the trim lights into place then drill holes for the lights inside the door handles and storage areas. From what I've seen most kits come with the proper size drill bit so the lights fit snugly and the wires for the acrylic strips in my kit were pretty thin and matched the color of the plastic on the doors so I just ran it behind the edge of the panel to the control box. Each door got its own sub-control box that gets power from the power window motors. Since this was my first time pulling the interior of the car apart and I didn't really know exactly where I wanted to place the lights, the process took me about five and a half hours from start to finish. In my opinion the end result was well worth the work and really adds to the otherwise boring interior of the car. I decided to keep the lights as long as possible to cover as much area as I could but the acrylic strips can be cut to pretty much any length you'd like.
I attached a couple screenshots but here are some videos of the lights during the day and night.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ccxs...5453.mp4?dl=0&rlkey=3mghrczpnbvwzz4td3m3qzxwu
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1s2t...5456.MOV?rlkey=ckcleyx3cvot7epglhqxs26qc&dl=0
The little bit of stuff I've seen involves these cheap led lights that run through a bulky fiber optic tube that really doesn't function as advertised. During the day the light isn't really visible and at night, there's bright and dim spots all throughout the trim that just makes the whole thing look cheap and tacky. The kit I ended up running across is an acrylic strip with led lights running through the entire length which gets rid of the "hot spots" people tend to see and allows it to give off evenly distributed light that's visible in direct sunlight. The kits available on amazon are pretty much the same cheap Chinese things that all function pretty similarly and tend to stick around $80-$120 depending on the size of the kit and the seller. I wanted an 18 piece kit which comes with acrylic strips to go across the entire dash and all four doors as well as lights to illuminate the door handles, storage areas, and footwells which ran me about $100.
The installation wasn't complex but it required a bit of time and patience to pull the interior of the car apart and figure out a good way to run the wiring for the lights. I started with the dash which required pulling most of the trim loose but not completely off. I did have to disconnect the A/C controls and pull the head unit down to run the lights and wiring behind it. For the doors I had to pull the interior panels off and push the trim lights into place then drill holes for the lights inside the door handles and storage areas. From what I've seen most kits come with the proper size drill bit so the lights fit snugly and the wires for the acrylic strips in my kit were pretty thin and matched the color of the plastic on the doors so I just ran it behind the edge of the panel to the control box. Each door got its own sub-control box that gets power from the power window motors. Since this was my first time pulling the interior of the car apart and I didn't really know exactly where I wanted to place the lights, the process took me about five and a half hours from start to finish. In my opinion the end result was well worth the work and really adds to the otherwise boring interior of the car. I decided to keep the lights as long as possible to cover as much area as I could but the acrylic strips can be cut to pretty much any length you'd like.
I attached a couple screenshots but here are some videos of the lights during the day and night.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ccxs...5453.mp4?dl=0&rlkey=3mghrczpnbvwzz4td3m3qzxwu
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1s2t...5456.MOV?rlkey=ckcleyx3cvot7epglhqxs26qc&dl=0
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