Putco LED Light Bulb Load-Resistor Kit - Ceramic

Video Transcript for Review of Putco Light Parts - LED Light Bulb Ceramic Load Resistor - P230004C

Ellen: Hey everyone, I'm Ellen here at etrailer.com and we're going to be taking a quick look at the Putco ceramic load resistors. Now, these are going to be a really easy way to fix a common problem whenever you're adding in LED lights to your trailer, or maybe your vehicle, motor home, or anything else. What happens is that vehicle is used to having a certain amount of power go through that system, and so it's expecting to see that, so whenever you put in an LED light, which has a much lower power draw, it thinks that something is wrong. And so it will cause that hyper flash similar to when you have a burned out bulb in an incandescent system. So this is going to build up the resistance in the electrical and make sure that the system is basically fooled into thinking that it has that same amount of power that it's used to.So it's a pretty easy fix for a very common problem. This particular resistor is going to be the ceramic type.

So it's going to work pretty well. One thing I will say, if you're going to be in an area that's very, very cold, you might want to go with the aluminum version just because ceramic is very durable, but it can be pretty brittle. And in colder weather, that's going to become even more of an issue. So something to keep in mind, if you're way up north or you're going anywhere that might be really, really cold. Also with these, I would say that you want to make sure that you install this somewhere that's a little out of the way that it isn't going to be jostled around.

So you want to really make sure that you zip tie this to the other wires or find a way to keep this from getting bounced around too much.So let's take a little closer look at it and talk a little bit more about how the install is going to work. Basically what you do is you put one end in line with your wiring. You want to put this on the turn signal or whatever signal is going to be flashing intermittently, which is to clear your turn signals. So you're going to need one for either side. So you'll probably want to get two of these.

There is a part number where you can get a quantity of two, it's just the same part number-2. The other side, you'll just need to connect into a ground so, that you can use one of these quick splices to splice into the existing ground. Or you can get a ring terminal, attach that on the end, and then use a screw to attach that to a nice, good chassis ground, or find a factory ground and attach it to that.Now it doesn't come with the ring terminal and I would honestly switch these out. Instead of using these quick splices, I would use heat shrink butt connectors instead for that connection into your wiring, it does require you cutting the wire, but you pretty much are cutting the wire with these anyway. And I just feel like these are not super reliable.

A lot of times if wiring fails it's because it's got one of these little guys, they just don't like to stay closed, they don't like to stay together and they are not waterproof. So that's something to keep in mind. Heat shrink butt connectors do create a water tight seal around the wire, so I would just suggest those. You'd probably be fine with either the blue or the yellow. The blue ones are going to be 14 to 16 gauge wire, yellow ones are 10 to 12. The reason why I'd want that is just because the bigger size will allow for having two wires in one, this is probably about 16 to 14 gauge. So either one of those would probably work just fine.You can also find those here at etrailer.com to go with it. So that's kind of what I would suggest picking up while you're here to get all of that installed. If you're putting in new lights anyway, it's not a bad idea to have those things as well, because they'll probably need them for that light installation.As far as the size of the resistor, it's about two and a half inches long. That's just this portion here with the wiring. It's got some heat shrink around it. It's about four and a half inches to where it first bends, so I'd give yourself about four inches of space around this to make sure that you don't have to bend those wires. If it's a really tight spot, you can probably bend them around without it being too big of an issue. We'll say it's about half an inch wide and half an inch tall. The wiring coming off either side got about four inches to work with. That's pretty much all there is to it for our look at the Putco LED light bulb load resistors. I hope this has been helpful in deciding if this is going to be the right solution for you. Again, I'm Ellen here at etrailer.com. Thanks for watching.