chrispwill

Yes, the warm color of the lamps is more appealing to me. I do work with LEDs for illumination and back lighting all the time, so there are warmer color temps out there. I may do this, just not right away. But as for the lights draining the battery, I believe that the cars (both my 2007 Legacy LTD and 2008 Outback) state in the manual that the interior lights will turn off after a preset delay to prevent battery drain. It is an automatic function of the lighting system, so I am not worried about that aspect much. I have had my kids play with the dome light switch and found them on after a weekend in my old 1993 Legacy wagon with no ill effect on the battery. Sure it drained it a little, but it is such a low current draw overall. My 2008 Outback does everything the modification does right from the start. I believe someone posted that Subaru must have come to the decision to include map lights in the control circuit after so many owners previously complained and asked about it in earlier models. Either that, or the original owners of the 2008 did the mod too! I will have to take down the map light fixture and look to see if the mod is there. Both of these Subaru's are new to our family since late spring, so my wife has always lamented about the lack of illumination up front as opposed to the Outback being bright. This mod took care of the issue. Thanks!

Just finished the modification on our 2007 Legacy LTD Wagon. All worked as expected when I finished. The only thing I should have done was remove the 20A fuse first as I was not as careful as I should have been reversing the pins in that connector. But it was cool that there were spare fuses in the fuse box cover! I opted for a "no-solder" solution and used inline wire splice connectors, heat shrink on the diodes (IN4001's are rated for 50V and 1 Amp of current if memory serves me properly) and I pushed in my drain wire from the map lights into the center of the dome light connector (from the rear or course) to avoid a bulky splice block. A few wire ties to keep it neat and it works! So, I am hearing many say that the mods work after several years. This is a good sign! But, has anyone done the mod and retained the incandescent lamps rather than changing to LED bulbs? I may pull a bulb and measure their actual current draw (each) to get a solid handle on how much current 3 lamps is placing on the BUI module. I think that was a MOSFET device? If so, they are pretty efficient and do their switching (or dimming with PWM no doubt) with very little power wasted to heat. PWM is pulse width modulation and a very effective way to achieve smooth dimming with lighting. I am not as keen on LED's for some reason, but may look for some in a warm color temperature to replace the filament lamps. I would only do this for certain if I heard anyone say they eventually cooked a BUI module due to the higher current over an extended time period. I read ALL 24 pages of posts! Whew! I appreciate the wiring schematic that thesavo posted near the end! Thanks for that. Finally, thanks to mwiener2 for the post and staying with this thread over all the years.