Condensation in my headlights? Come on. Why is there condensation in my headlights? All right, so earlier technology in automobiles,
they had steel beam headlights. Generally speaking, they were sealed glass
beams, they had a nice either circle or rectangle beam, and the whole inside of it and everything
was completely sealed. It was a halogen bulb of course, and yeah,
it generated heat, but that's okay because it was glass. What was going to happen? As technology evolved and styles of vehicles
changed, people wanted something more sleek, aerodynamic, better fuel economy, whatever
the case may be. Manufacturers began to realize that they needed
to create different style headlamps and there's plenty of different style headlamps. And every vehicle has something a little different. Different length, different shape, whatever. To make those out of a sealed beam of glass,
something this size, first of all, would be super heavy, where they decided to make it
out of plastic, something super light. It's also, of course, much easier for somebody
to make out of plastic than it is out of glass. So, the benefits of plastic over glass, generally
speaking, would be the fact that it's much lighter, you can make it different shapes,
so it can be aerodynamic, it can fit with the shape of your vehicle, but, that of course,
led to problems. When you're running halogen bulbs inside of
a plastic assembly, the halogen bulb gets very hot, especially if you're running something
like a Xenon bulb. Those get much hotter. But anyway, you create heat inside of your
plastic lamp assembly. When you have that heat inside your lamp assembly,
it was a little bit different when it was glass, the glass didn't want to expand and
you didn't have as many chances of it wanting to crack along the seams or get dry and brittle. Plastic, on the other hand, it doesn't like
the heat that much. It doesn't like to have a whole bunch of heat
on the inside, on one side, and cold on the other. So they had to do something else to try to
correct that. They needed to evacuate that heat or vent
the heat. So, that's when we get on the backside of
these headlamp assemblies, and I'm going to show you where the vents are. Plastic assemblies need to have some sort
of venting. They need a way to let that heat out, right? So they created something like this, a lot
of them have this little tube, you pull that off, and it'll generally speaking have a hole
that goes into the inside portion of the headlamp. These are not completely sealed, they're vented. The reason for that is because air needs to
circulate in and out of there. As the hot air accumulates inside here, it
needs to start pushing out. It needs someplace to go. If you start plugging up all these vent holes,
you're going to have cracked lenses. Sealing it doesn't make any sense. Then you don't have any way of the heat coming
out of the lens. You need to have these vents. Almost every plastic assembly is going to
have a vent, and that's to let the heat out. And that leads us to condensation. So, when you have condensation inside of your
lens, whether it's because your vent's clogged, or just because the temperature inside the
lens didn't match the exterior temperature, maybe it was a little bit warmer out during
the day, you were parked in the sun, you had your headlights on for quite a while, it heated
up the air inside of this lens, you park your car, go do whatever it is you're doing, you
have some dinner and go get some ice cream, whatever it is you do, you come back out and
it got a little bit colder out. The ambient air temperature is a little bit
chillier. But the air inside of this lens is still nice
and warm. And it's humid and everything like that because
maybe there was moisture in the air, you went through a carwash, you ran through a puddle,
it was just raining outside, whatever the case may be. You have moist, humid, warm air inside this
lens. Right? Now, the cold air is just pushing up against
this exterior portion of the plastic. Once this plastic starts getting cold from
the exterior air, or the ambient air temperature, it's going to start trying to cool down the
temperature inside of the lens. When that starts happening, the thin line
of air that's along the inside of this lens is going to start cooling down. And as that happens, all those little air
molecules or water molecules that are floating around inside the air start getting cold and
they want to try to come together. They're like, "Ohh." They get close to whatever it is that's trying
to make them cold. And they're going to attach themselves to
along this portion of the plastic lens because that's what's trying to make the interior
temperature of the air colder. I don't know if you've ever been sitting inside
your vehicle on, like, a winter night or winter day. You're in there and you're breathing, you
can see your breath, you're fogging up your windows. It's kind of the same thing. The outside portion of the windows is cold,
and the inside portion is getting humid from your body, you know, I'm letting off steam
probably right now, actually. It's all accumulating inside the cabin of
your vehicle. So then you get the steam inside of your vehicle. Same thing happens here. You crack your windows a little bit, you put
on your defroster, same thing. You have a vent, it's going to vent out that
air, it's going to circulate it, the temperature is going to be able to match what's going
on outside much quicker, and you're going to be able to get rid of that condensation
that's inside the lens. Okay, so here's a prime example of what a
headlamp would look like with some condensation inside of it. We've all seen it, we've all gotten a little
bit worried about it, and maybe even freaked out, but it's nothing to worry about. This is condensation. Next, I'd like to talk to you about a puddle
of water inside your lens. That's something you might want to worry about,
and I want to show you a couple things to check out on that. So let's talk about the backside of these
lenses and where they could possibly leak a little bit of water. Of course, you have your vent areas. That's one thing to think about, super important. Generally speaking, you should have something
over it, maybe like one of those vented caps that will keep water from splashing right
up in there. One of those little tubes as you saw on one
of the other lenses, that goes down, it's going to help keep water from splashing in. This right here is a kind of poor design and
it could be a great cause of why there would be so much water inside this lens. Another thing you need to think about is you
have the areas where your bulbs are supposed to go in, these caps, generally speaking,
should have a rubber seal of some sort. And this is super important. This one looks really good, right, while it's
on the cap. Let's talk about it though. You take that, you give it a little stretch,
and if you can see right here where my finger is, this is not in great condition at all. Moisture can work its way right inside here,
and it's going to fill up that lens, easy-peasy. All right, so let's say you're driving down
the road, and a rock comes flying up and bonks your headlight. Bonk. Well, that's going to cause an issue. You're driving down the road continuing on,
it starts to rain or somehow water's splashing around, where's the water going to get in? Right about here. If you have a little bit of condensation inside
your headlamp like this, it's all natural. This is what's bound to happen once in a while. There isn't anything that you can do about
it. Seal everything as much as you want, you're
still going to have issues. If you have an issue that looks like this,
well, then you've got real problems. This is not normal. And in which case you either want to try to
seal this or in my case, I would just go to 1aauuto.com, get myself a brand new headlamp
assembly, and down the road we go.
