lighting help/suggestions

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jareddustin

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i have a 2021 4 seat velocity.

like everyone else i have a 32" light bar mounted on the roof. 

i learned this weekend that light bar is almost useless. in our group we have 3 SxS and 3-4 quads. i am typically toward the rear of the group, all the light bar does is light up everyones dust. most the time i ended up just using the stock rzr headlights. even just going from camp in the washes to vendors by my self the light bar just lit up all the dust and made it hard to see. the light bar is not an amazon special but its not a baja designs. feel like its a decent mid range light bar. spot/flood combo 

looking for ways to improve the lighting so im not just lighting up dust. from all my other reading on these posts everyone really likes the amber baja pods (xl80 i think). those are a bit pricey and more than i would like to spend right now are there other mid range ones that are good. baja makes a nice headlight replacement with 2 pods in each headlight that i would like to get but at $1700 that is not really in my budget right now. am i just wasting money going mid range lights?

my main question is mounting. where to mount them to get the best result. do they need to be lower on the front of the car, or on about where the cage bolts to the car? are pods better than a small light bar if mounting on the front? 

 
I heard people talk about mounting amber lights on the front bumper or A pillar. But when I turn on my 50” light bar it’s like a brown out. Back to the stock lights. 

 
Obviously, as you have figured out, overhead lighting will always light up the "unseen" or floating dust in the air. Overhead lighting is the best in clean air for visibility, and the worst in the dust.  Amber helps to cut it down, but does not light as well.  Low mount lights, pillar or even better bumper mounted will reduce looking thru the floating dust in the air.  LED's seem to enhance the dust in the air even more than old halogens or even HID's, which doesn't help.  

There are some snap over amber covers for the LED light bars, and you could try that for a starting point.

 
ROBERT L said:
I heard people talk about mounting amber lights on the front bumper or A pillar. But when I turn on my 50” light bar it’s like a brown out. Back to the stock lights. 
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what do you mean like a brown out?

 
2dasand said:
I think he means like turning your high beams on in the fog, but it is brown because it is dust!
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thank you! that was the problem i was having this weekend. and what im trying to fix or at least make it not as bad. 

 
If you want a cost effective quality amber pod, I always suggest spanks designs squadron sport XL’s $320 I try to keep them in stock 

half the price of the ever popular XL80’s and low power consumption something all sxs’s owners need to pay attention to. 
 

a pillar mounts on Amazon work fine and Madigan makes an even better (stout) mount that doesn’t vibrate like the clamp on or cheap China ones do. 
 

bumper lights are great too give you have a bumper and what it’s tabbed for. 

 
jareddustin said:
i have a 2021 4 seat velocity.

like everyone else i have a 32" light bar mounted on the roof. 

i learned this weekend that light bar is almost useless. in our group we have 3 SxS and 3-4 quads. i am typically toward the rear of the group, all the light bar does is light up everyones dust. most the time i ended up just using the stock rzr headlights. even just going from camp in the washes to vendors by my self the light bar just lit up all the dust and made it hard to see. the light bar is not an amazon special but its not a baja designs. feel like its a decent mid range light bar. spot/flood combo 

looking for ways to improve the lighting so im not just lighting up dust. from all my other reading on these posts everyone really likes the amber baja pods (xl80 i think). those are a bit pricey and more than i would like to spend right now are there other mid range ones that are good. baja makes a nice headlight replacement with 2 pods in each headlight that i would like to get but at $1700 that is not really in my budget right now. am i just wasting money going mid range lights?

my main question is mounting. where to mount them to get the best result. do they need to be lower on the front of the car, or on about where the cage bolts to the car? are pods better than a small light bar if mounting on the front? 
Click to expand...
A long time ago I met a very wise man who learned the reason behind everything, including lights for his sand rail. He had Hella HIDs on the roof and on his front bumper. The roof mounted lights had amber film on them, like window tint. I had some cheap HIDs on the roof of my sand rail.

I asked him about the reasoning behind his lighting setup and he had a logical reason for all of it. He chose Hella because they were the best at the time, LEDs weren't out yet. Even the best BD LEDs still don't have the throw HIDs have, but that's not pertinent. 

He mounted amber lights on his roof because he wanted contrasting light from his roof and bumper, it was a trick he learned from Rally cars. The different angle and colors allowed greater contrast and whoops, dips, etc stood out much better than if he had all white lights. We went out to a whooped out section of road and he showed me. He turned on his bumper lights and it was nice and bright out there, but when he turned on the amber roof lights, suddenly you could see the whoops and terrain much better because of the differing color and angle. If there was no dust, he ran both sets. If it was dusty, just the bumper lights. If it was slightly dusty, he made a judgement call, since the amber lights didn't reflect off the dust quite as much.

So my recommendation would be to get an amber cover for the roof light bar and either a light bar or good pods for the bumper. Run all of them when it's not dusty and just the bumper lights if it gets too dusty. 

 
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