Well, judging by the statement that you put 10K bulbs on your car, they are aftermarket bulbs.

With that said, you get what you pay for with aftermarket HIDs. OEM bulbs are pretty pricey, $75+ or so, while aftermarket are dirt cheap....for a reason. A lot of bulbs are cheap, Chinese bulbs.

Try a different brand bulb. I used DDM tuning and have had my 5k bulbs for over 2 years with no issues.

 

Do you happen to have a link to those?

 

Or you can get a quality set from us at a fair price here: http://www.diodedynamics.com/store/l...ulbs-all-sizes

Plus ours are backed by a 1-year warranty and I'll be here should you ever need anything

Thanks!
Nick C.

 

Thank you. I will do that right after Christmas

 

If it blew a Phillips within a year and you didn't touch the bulb during install, I'd guess a ballast issue as well. Maybe running high voltage. You could always put a multimeter to the socket. I believe they should read 35watts. Unless someone can interject

 

A multimeter won't read watts. Only voltage and/or current (amps). Not an easy measurement to take and not many multimeters can read DC amps.

Watts is calculated by multiplying the voltage by the amperage.

I wouldn't recommend measuring the output side in any way

 

I did a little reading on HID ballasts. Unless you have an oscope and/or electronics debug training, I don't recommend probing the output side of the ballast.

An HID ballast has two modes it works in: 1)Warm up 2)ON
During warmup, it sends constant current at low voltage to the HID buld. During ON, the ballast ramps down the current and increases the voltage until it reaches the steady state ON voltage. Ideally during each of these modes the power to the bulb remains constant. The ballast just trades current for voltage.

So using a multimeter would only work if you put the meter in series with the bulb. The reason why is that I believe that the ballast is sensing the current to the bulb and making adjustments (like a DC switching power supply). You'd have to make a fixture to wire the bulb (so there would be a load) and meter together and it'd be a big pain to do. Swapping ballasts around and new bulbs is probably more straightforward of a debug approach.