There’s plenty of talk these days about negative switching – it’s a simple concept but one that gets thrown around so much it ends up being more confusing than it ought to be. If you’re ready to install auxiliary driving lights into your vehicle but you’re confused about what it all means then read on! In this article we’ll go through what negative switching is, and why it matters so much when you’re installing LED driving lights or an LED Light bar. This is more of an issue on newer vehicles and if you want to know the solution to making your LED Driving lights work without reading the article… the answer is a plug n play wiring harness that is able to work with both positive and negatively switched vehicles right out of the box.

So what is negative switching? Well, if you think of a traditional electrical circuit, let’s say you were running an LED light bar directly off a battery and battery box, well find that the switch to turn the light bar on and off was on the positive wire travelling from the battery to the light itself, so the negative wire running back from the LED light to the battery would be a single run of wire. On the other hand a negatively switched circuit is the opposite: the red positive wire is always connected while the switch to turn the light on and off (by completing the circuit) is positioned on the negative black wire. So to simplify it even further, there’s always a positive connection flowing from the battery to the LED light bar, but it’s not until you flick the switch on the negative ‘on’ that your LED light bar will turn on.

Why does that stop a standing Driving light wiring harness from working properly? Well the answer is because a standard wiring harness connects to the back of the high beam and uses it as a trigger for the LED driving lights. If the high beam is on then you’re able to switch the driving lights on and off via the switch on the harness by again completing the circuit. In a standard positively switched vehicle this is fine, because both the vehicle head lights and the LED Driving Lights are both positively switched – that means the negative wire is always connected to the earth, but the positive wire which actually feeds power to the lights themselves has a switch. This means you can independently turn on the high beam, which then feeds power to the positive wire of the driving light wiring harness, allowing you to then independently turn on the Auxiliary driving lights.  However the problem is when the headlight high beams are negatively switched (so they’re always connected to the power) and your Driving light wiring harness is connected constantly to the negative, it actually unintentionally completes the circuit and can cause your lights to play up. Again the solution is an Adventure Kings Smart Plug n Play wiring harness, which is suitable for both negative switching and positive switching right out of the box and is also suitable for both LED light bars thanks to its single deutsch plug output, as well as a pair of lights thanks to the included double deutsch adapter. The plug n play wiring harness uses sophisticated electronics to always ensure that power is only flowing to your LED Driving lights when the high beams and the harness switch are both actually on.

If you don’t want to go with the quick and easy option of using an Adventure Kings plug n play smart harness, then you can use a standard wiring harness too, but it may require some modifications. On some vehicles this could be as easy as re-routing the wires on the included headlight adapter to ensure that you’re only getting positive and negative connections to your harness and LED Driving Lights when the high beams are on. On some models though you need to actually disconnect the earth wire from the back of the relay in the harness and replace it with a wire that already runs from the headlight adapter part of the harness back to the switch. So you unplug the wire from the switch and plug it instead into the relay, leaving the original earth cable loose *but taped up for protection* this prevents your LED driving lights from earthing back through the relay and to the battery, unless the switch is in the on position. However it can also prevent your LED tell tale from working on the switch itself. It isn’t a requirement to have a tell tale when installing aftermarket LED driving lights but it is a nice feature to have.

So, again if you don’t want to go through the hassle of re-wiring your circuit to make your LED Driving lights work then make sure you grab yourself a plug n play harness. They work with all Adventure Kings Led light bars from the 3” worklights right up to the 40” Laser Light bar plus they work with all Adventure Kings Led Driving Lights from the 7” Domin8r Xtreme right through the super bright 8.5” Laser Driving Lights. Whether you want to install LED Driving lights onto your 4WD, ute, van or even boat, an Adventure Kings Plug N play smart harness is the fastest and easiest way to get them lighting up the night. Make sure you check out the full range as there really is something for everyone and every setup and plenty of combo deals that make it easy and affordable to get the right lights!