Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
Equipment Installed: Intensity Solis LED Lights, Quadratec JL-LMB Heavy-Duty Auxiliary Light Mount Brackets
Vehicle: 2020 Jeep Gladiator Rubicon
Installation Difficulty: Easy - Moderate (depending on your knowledge with wiring)
Would we recommend? Yes! These lights are very bright and the dimming feature is clutch!
What you need to know: If you are using the Jeep factory auxiliary switches, you'll need to do some extra research and will have a lot of excess wiring (plan for using many zip ties!). If you're tapping into your lights, you're good to go and the instructions explain that (we didn't do this).
Our experience with the ARB Intensity line of lights was extremely positive, as we have installed a pair on Jeepy and was blown away by the amount and quality of light they produced. While researching options for Groot, we originally planned on going this route again. However, ARB had just released the Intenstity Solis lights. The key feature that attracted us to the Intensity Solis was the dimming feature, which allows the light output to be tailored to suit the environment via a dimming switch. This enables you to dim the light when traveling from back country areas through populated rural towns and villages, or if you are moving in a convoy of vehicles and do not want to blind the person in front of you.
Like the Intensity series of lights, the Solis is offered in both a Spot and a Flood beam pattern. We opted for this Spot/Flood set up for Groot, which provides a wide and dispersed pattern and a focused pattern to illuminate the area in front of us. The Solis boasts 65 Watts of power and 18,178 lumens via 36 Osra LEDs (6x10 watts and 30x4 watts) with individually tuned reflector cups molded into a single reflector. For ruggedness, ARB rates the lights as being IP68 water and dust proof.
Because Groot is equipped with the factory option auxiliary switches from Jeep, the installation instructions provided by ARB had to be adapted since those required tapping into the hi-beam lights. For our install, we used Aux 3, as #3 (pink/orange) and #4 (blue/pink) are 15 AMP. Aux #1 (brown/pink) and #2 (green/pink) are 40 AMP.
There weren't a lot of posts online for installing via the factory auxiliary switches, but thankfully we found an article posted In Tents Adventures, who had just done this install on their JL with the same factory auxiliary switches. After reading the article multiple times and messaging back forth with In Tents Adventures (Thank you, In Tents!), installation of the Solis lights was complete with only a few lessons learned.
Our biggest lesson learned is that you don't want to cut out the excess wires in an attempt to bypass wires you won't be using. Whoops, lesson learned and a new harness ordered. We were hoping to clean up some of the excess wiring and got a bit ahead of ourselves. So on our second harness, we were able to get everything connected and the lights functioning via the interior auxiliary switches. Just know that if you are using the auxiliary switches, you will have a lot of unused wires you'll just have to neatly tuck away under the hood.
Notice the bundle of wires tucked beside the battery. Have plenty of zip ties on hand!
We mounted the lights to a set of brackets from Quadratec, which places the lights on the front bumper. There is noticeable vibration of the lights while driving, which we plan on addressing by fabricating a spacer to install between the brackets and the bumper. Note, we are running the factory Mopar bumper for the time being. More on that soon and the spacer update soon.
Overall, we are satisfied with the quality and performance of the Solis lights. Our experience with ARB products has been overwhelmingly positive, as we have run their equipment on Jeepy over the last 11 years. The ARB Intensity Solis live up to these expectations, and we look forward to many years of service and travel with these lights.
Post Update
We've been asked about where we mounted the dimmer remote and what the screen options look like once the lights were connected to the auxiliary cables. Great questions, so we wanted to update the post with that information.
Once you wire into the Mopar factory auxiliary switch, there are a few settings you can adjust on the screen if desired. These, we recall, being the default settings. We played around with them, but didn't find the particularly useful in any other settings, so we kept them as the default.
For the dimmer remote, we had plenty of wire to place this elsewhere, but didn't want to run it across the top of the dash nor did we feel like pulling the dash apart (not fans of exposed wires), so we found this location just inside of the driver's door a great spot. It's easily accessible by the driver without having to take your eyes off the road and was an easy location to run the wire from under the hood, into the vehicle. We did pull the front panel off of the Gladiator, near the side mirror, but it was easy to take off and reattach so the wires could cleanly run through into the door. We first tried to use Gorilla double sided tape to attach it to the inside after the 3m strips that came with it didn't work, but those didn't work either. We tried Alien Tape, and that seems to be working great!
Hope that helps! Thanks for reading!
Comments