Anyone put LED's in the map light location and have them slightly stay on????? Im just a little nervous that they will eventually kill the battery......

 

It wont. To my understanding... on a 100% life battery, over the course of a year it'll eat away at 1-1.5% of it's life.

Edit:
I've had mine in for a few weeks short of 8 months.

 

Kool....Do you have them anywhere else other than the map lights??

 

I have LED bulbs in the map lights, above license plate, and in trunk.

 

Where did you get the trunk and map light LED bulbs? I have seen the license plate lights somewhere but not the others. THANKS!

 

You can get them off of V-led.com

 

https://themustangsource.com/f802/le...-plate-484899/

 

LEDs will use less than 200mA (normally around 100mA) at full intensity; at 10% brightness (which is generous, it's probably closer to 3-4%), that means it's using around 20mA. Since most batteries are rated at about 400Ah reserve, assuming there are 5 dimly lit LEDs (giving 100mA), an average battery will power those LEDs for about 4,000 hours. That's about 5 and a half months.

So no, I wouldn't worry too terribly about them.

 

I am curious . . .

How can the LED lights be getting any voltage/current when they are switched off?

Is there not a normal switch in the circuit?

Isn't an open circuit an open circuit regardless of the type of light bulb?

 

It's entirely possible that there's other circuitry that it's leaking from. Say, the active theft monitors. The current being used for them somehow emits into the LEDs.

I'm totally guessing, but that's entirely plausible, and you all know it.

Unless someone wants to point me to a full Mustang wiring diagram so I can peruse it...

 

The smart junction box uses triacs (electronic gates) for switching lower-ampere circuits like interior lights, turn signals etc. Since the resistance of the LED's are so low, the tiny bit of bleed current is enough to make them glow slightly. Ford adds a dummy relay under the dash to give the turn-signal clicking sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIAC

 

AH. Triacs. Well, THAT explains it. And the fading trick. I shoulda knew about that, I learned about triacs in my Lutron RadioRA classes. Now the leak makes all the sense in the world.

The thing to do is get slightly 'loaded' led bulbs, so they have enough resistance in them to prevent the leak...

Hey. That brings up a reason for the batteries to die, if there's more of this 'smart' stuff going on.

/Neat stuff.
//Hear RA2's even better.

 

Thanks for that, makes sense . . . sort of a "soft switch" not a true open circuit like the old fashioned kind

 

I don't think there's been any mechanical switching for this sort of thing in a long time. Mechanical switches for inputs, perhaps (door switches spring to mind [no pun intended]), but most current switching has been done through transistors for a while. And transistors always have leakage current. Which is enough to slightly power an LED.

Even my old '95 SHO runs the door lights through the remote keyless module, which has transistor switching. If you have a regular taurus without remote keyless, then yeah it goes through mechanical switching, but the RKEM was in SHOs beginning 1991... very nearly 20 years ago.