I bought a used 2009 that had PnP bi-xenon HIDs installed for the headlights and fogs. I find that the light glares into other drivers and does not have a good cutoff. I am planning to revert back to the stock halogen setup until I decide whether to go with a HID projector retrofit.

Is the process very straight forward? Is there anything I should watch out for?

Is it like this?
- Remove the bi-xenon bulbs
- Unplug the bulbs from harness
- Detach the ballast connection to the stock harness. Remove ballast.
- Reinstall the halogen bulbs
- Reconnect the stock harness to bulbs
- Check to ensure fuse #15 is there and the right rating.

I have never dealt with HIDs before but I've worked on cars for most general maintenance and repairs.

 

Just like installing now go backward....

 

Ok, I've got my lights back to stock on my GE8. It was pretty easy and took 5 minutes. Just as above because the person who installed it didn't mess around with the stock harness. I decided to keep the HID wiring and ballasts in place just in case. The fog/driving lights are kept as HID so I can light up the deer and owls.

 

That sucks I love the look of HID's

 

Yep, the look of the HIDs are nice. However, the ones on mine were lighting up everything except toward the front. The aiming was right but the beam pattern was odd. I could see it shining up the sidewalks, 3 metres in front of my bumper, and up into the trees and upper floors of buildings.

I sold the whole set to a kid with a Dodge Neon for $20.

 

possible they didn't seat it correctly.

After I replaced the headlight housing on a Mitsubishi Mirage (stock broke, put dual halos), I swapped the bulbs (fake HID halogen bulbs), but I missed the seating and it shined all the light straight up. I pulled it out, and tried again, making sure it seated correctly and it turned out fine.

Right now, I have a mismatched pair of PnP HID bulbs in the Pathfinder I drive (getting the Fit in two weeks, hopefully). It's mismatched because the bulb in the set burned out and I put a bulb from another set (bit of a long story, short: have 1 kit in truck, two kits on garage table). The one on the driver side has a little bit of upper glare (some light is leaking through the shield gap), but I aimed it down to minimize the glare. The passenger side, which is the older bulb, doesn't have any upper glare and it has a really good halogen style cutoff. The problem is, the driver side is brighter than the passenger side. Or rather, the one with the better cutoff is a bit weak.

By halogen style cutoff, I mean that for the most part the headlight is supposed to be level at the middle and everything to the left, but on the right, it angles up to light up the sidewalk and various street signs. Most, if not all HID projectors are level from left to right.

looks kinda like

__/ (but the angle isn't that steep, maybe 45 or little less)

vs
___ for HIDs

everything above the line is supposed to be mostly dark, and everything below is supposed to get all the light the bulbs can put out.

I have a question, might sound silly, but were the bulbs upside down or sideways? The shield has to be on the bottom when it's installed, so the light shines up into the reflector and bounces out and downwards. I knkow it's supposed to be "only able" to go in one way, but I found out you can put them in wrong.

Going back to the Pathfinder, if you look at the headlight itself with the lights on low beam (stand to one side, not directly in line)... you'll see a dark patch on the passenger side with the good cutoff bulb. But on the driver side, the whole glass/plastic is "lit up," although the spot that's supposed to be dark isn't as bright as the rest, since the shield is still blocking most of the light.

 

I took some time looking at the installation and the design of these when removing them. They were seated properly and weren't upside down either. Same with the shields.

Basically, the design is faulty. The beam pattern is more like an "O" for each lamp. I could see that the previous owner had tried to make up for this by aiming the lamps very low until the tops of the "O"s were at about the hood level. This lit up the car length in front of my bumper very well.

 

An "O" beam pattern? That seems to mean the bulb wasn't at the correct focal point. It is either too far forward or backward. If you want to know what I mean, get a MAG Lite and twist the head a few times from flood to spot beam... same idea.

If it's too far forward, you can try adding a spacer to see if it helps. You can see if this is the case by put it side by side with a regular halogen bulb. If it's too far forward, it'll be further from the base.

It's a bit harder depending on the bulb, if it's not far enough forward.

Base on what you describe, I wonder if the previous owner was using either an older conversion kit or did it them self. You could take a D2S bulb and mix and match spacers and flanges to fit almost any type of housing, H4, H7, H11, etc.

 

I am going back to stock tomorrow lol

 

I guess all I can say is some reflectors do better than others.

Personally, I hope I can eventually make use of this (hopefully with some HIDs too):

Sypder