Skip to content Moisture in headlights can be a frustrating problem to deal with. Is It Time for a Replacement? Categories Know How Tags halogen headlights , headlamps , headlight , headlight condensation , headlights , visibility. Related Articles. Benjamin Hunting View All Having been bitten by the car bug at a young age, I spent my formative years surrounded by Studebakers at car shows across Quebec and the northeastern United States.
Leave a Reply Cancel Reply Your email address will not be published. Close Menu Overlay. Blockages might mean that the moisture is struggling to escape once it has got inside.
Use a brush or cloth or even compressed air to clean out your vents if necessary. This might be enough to stop the lights from misting over. Try putting your hairdryer against one of the vents or even just the front of the light, and turning it onto a low heat. The warm air should help to evaporate the moisture, encouraging the inside of the light to dry out. However, you will have to allow it to cool again before you can see if this has worked. Just put one or two inside each lens, not touching the bulb.
They will absorb a good amount of moisture from the air, and then you can remove them, dry them in the oven, and use them again. Some people recommend drilling small holes at the bottom of the headlights to allow moisture to escape.
If you drill a very small hole, you can then gently heat the bulb by turning it on, using a hairdryer, etc. Yes, condensation in small quantities is fairly normal. The headlights are a vital part of your vehicle, guiding you safely at night and in certain inclement weather conditions. If you find cracks or other damage to the housing, the situation is only going to worsen over time.
Plus, the longer the moisture sits in the headlights, the greater the chance it will infiltrate the headlight itself. And that damage could lead to a larger repair bill. It also may be time to replace your headlights if the housing is dingy, cloudy, or hazy. The protective coating breaks down over time through exposure to the elements and UV rays. This will make the housing become dingy and impact how well the headlights work when you need them.
Chemicals and dirt can also cause damage and give the headlights a foggy appearance. Decreased visibility can endanger you and your passengers. Modern light sources, however, generate less heat than halogen lamps and incandescent lights: Xenon headlights, for example, have a greater tendency to fog up than those using halogen lamps.
The problem of fogging is one that headlight designers have grappled with for years. A compounding factor is that headlights are becoming increasingly larger and therefore contain more interior air. This air heats up while the car is being driven — due to the warmth of the lamps and the heat from the engine. Almost all modern headlights have a ventilation system that prevents a build-up of pressure by displacing this hot air, and this system is carefully designed to allow no direct ingress of water into the headlight housing.
However, in line with normal physical laws, air from outside is sucked back into the headlight interior when the inside air cools down again. If this outside air is humid, due to the prevailing weather conditions, condensation forms on the inside of the cover lens. Fogging disappears of its own accord after the headlights are switched on. Designers seek to accelerate this demisting process by diverting the residual heat from lamps or control gear through the headlight housing.
Despite all these efforts, not enough dry air is able to reach the farthest corners of the housing, and this is where condensation persists the longest.
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