Retrofit Daytime Running Light (DRL) to Nissan Sentra

According to some statistics, Daytime Running Light (DRL) makes your car more visible and may avoid accidents. Some says that is not true. You may find the arguments from both sides at here.

Personally, I think driving with my low beam lights on will make me more visible and is a good thing. So, I've been manually turning on my low beam on all the time.

After draining my battery a few times, I finally decided to install an automatically DRL on my Sentra. If you want a professional to retrofit your current vehicle with DRL, it may run about $150 plus tax. But you can do the job in about 20 minutes to an hour with a $30 universal (almost) DRL kit. There are a few companies making those, I got the Hamsar 45020 VISI-LIGHT from JC Whitney (part number: ZX135227R, once specified your car, browse in the light control section) for $27 plus shipping. It arrived within three days and my Saturday noon was subsequently scheduled for that.

For 2001 Nissan Sentra, you will also need an extra 4ft 18 Gauge wire and two tap splice connectors to connect the low beam wire from the two headlamps. The kit has two tap connectors included for connection to the low and high beam wires. Although was told so in the included installation guide, I still went ahead without one. The result was obvious: only one light worked. So, I had to run to the nearest Radio Shack to ge the wire and the tap connectors.

Another confusing part was to tell which wire to the headlamp is the low beam, which is the high beam. For 2001 Sentra, there are three wires connect the headlamp. A black in the middle, which should be ground (yes, it is). The other two are the same orange color wires, I couldn't tell which one according to the installation guide, so just randomly choose one as the low beam, which turned out to be wrong after everything's connected. The correct low beam wire is the one on the driver side.

Anyway, the whole installation took me about 70 minutes including the 15 minutes trip to Radio Shack.