How To Wire After-Market Angel Eye/DRL Headlights & What's involved.

Before buying after-market angel eye or day running headlights, make sure you have a bit of knowledge of how to fit them or how much they’ll cost to fit before purchasing.

You might see a lot of angel eyes with yellow halo rings – Those are literally plug and play headlights, just like a standard headlight. No wiring is necessary and we personally would say that you could be capable of fitting them yourself if you have a bit of knowledge on how to remove a headlight. There are however lots of guides and YouTube videos online that can assist and help you. They are 99% of the time DEPO branded angel eyes which are transferable between left hand drive to right hand drive via a metal lever. So when you get them and your MOT says they won’t pass – Don’t panic!

You can locate this lever next to where you install your main beam headlight bulb, however it’s sometimes located elsewhere on different angel eyes. All you do is push the lever up and voila!

Almost all DEPO branded angel eyes (with yellow bulb lit halo rings) do not come with bulbs, but you can use your original bulbs as well as the levelling motor. The Halo rings are 99% of the time T5 286 fitment bulbs which if you are patient enough, can be changed to a different colour. We recommend 90 degree pliers!

Angel eyes with white LED lit rings will have wires that need to be wired into your side-light wiring. The LED lights rely on the side-light wiring; they do not work independently. Most lights that are LED normally come complete with headlight bulbs. The brands you’ll more than likely be buying are either Junyan and Sonar.
The colours of the wires will vary, but in most cases they will be two different colours (normally red and black or black and white), to separate the GROUND wire from the POWER wire.

Gather up the white and black wires on the rear of the halo headlights and collect them into one pair of white wires and one pair of black wires (or red and black). The white/red wires are the positive wires, or the wires with power running through them, and the black wires are neutral.
You then connect the ground wire from your aftermarket light to the ground wire on your vehicles side-light wiring. Then you connect the power wire from your aftermarket lights to your LIVE side-light wire, and not your signal light wire.

If you connect your power wire to your vehicles signal light wire, this will cause your halo’s to blink whenever you turn on your signal lights.

You will find a fair few ways to connect the two wires together however what we recommend is using a scotchlok. It’s a small clamp where you put two different wires together and close down on a locking clamp. It properly connects the two wires together without any cutting of any of the wires yourself.

If you are experienced with wiring, you can splice them.
After that you test the lights to see if they are working properly by turning on your parking light.
This is where you can check to see if you have connected the right wires together.
If your halos don’t illuminate, don’t automatically assume that they’re faulty. Odds are they might not be correctly wired in or the incorrect wire has been wired in.

Some aftermarket headlights have what are called a Dual Halo or Twin Halo. This is where there are two halos on each light instead of one. The installation is exactly the same.

Most after-market angel eyes and day running lights will change from electric adjust to manual adjust, however in some cases you can take the manual adjuster out and fit your original levelling motor.

For manually adjusting headlights, on the back of your headlight unit you will see plastic inscriptions that will show an arrow of U + D and L & R. It stands for up down, left right. You need to turn them carefully to adjust your beam.

We would strongly recommend a garage levels the headlights for you, because they must meet MOT standards.

For those that have a T4 or T5, you’re rather lucky! Both yellow bulb lit angel eyes and LED white lit angel eyes/DRL’s are plug and play units.

This content was originally posted by a Car Throttle user on our Community platform and was not commissioned or created by the CT editorial team.