1981-1991 Suburban Lighting Upgrade

Generally most older vehicles with sealed beam headlights the lighting performance is mediocre. I was less than impressed with the stock headlights on my 1990 V2500 Suburban and unfortunately there are few options to upgrade. The 89-91 Suburban's use the uncommon 150mm sealed beams only found on a handful of vehicles. Sealed beams have limitations and I prefer housings that use replaceable bulbs to be able to change the wattage and temperature of the bulbs. Initially I swapped from standard sealed beams to the housings that LMC offers that accept normal headlight bulbs. Below is a comparison of the sealed beams on the left and the LMC housing on the right.

These were an improvement but I still disliked how only one set of lights was used for high beams instead of all 4. To remedy this I decided to build a custom harness that put the lights on relays while adding fog lights and driving lights. Below is the schematic I drew up to build my wire harness with an Eaton fuse box mounted on the front fender. I tapped into the factory wiring to trigger relays and feed the lights without rewiring the whole front end. This pulled the high amp power off the headlight switch as well. The diode is to prevent the low beam feed from triggering the high beam relay but allowing the high beam feed to trigger both high and low.

To go a long with converting to quad beams I built a light bar with a hoop from Barnes 4wd to hang Diode Dynamics SS3 pods. I am using two DOT fog pattern and DOT driving pattern lights.

All the lights installed and the final results are impressive. The lighting on this truck now rivals modern vehicles with LED headlights. The lighting improvement by just having all four headlights on with high beam is worth building a harness. The Diode Dynamic pods improve it even further. Below is a video demonstrating how the lights function without having to manually turn them on.