Quote:
Originally Posted by The Stig
This is a post from BasAssBumbleBee when he unboxed his AAC installed HID retrofit. It's not the best pic, but if you look at the one that's of the back of the housing you can see that it doesn't look like what's in your OP. Did you say AAC installed them?
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To Stig and anyone else that may be interested in the AAC Retrofit HID kit, here's my story.....
As you can see from my pictures, my lights arrive looking absolutely perfect. Unfortunately they arrived towards the end of November and I could not install them right away as my garage is not insulated. It gets a little chilly in Canada when you're trying to work on your car in the middle of winter.
Figuring it was the safest place to store them, I left my lights sitting in the original packaging sitting in the corner of my family room until this past spring. When I took them out to install them, the inside of both lenses had developed some nasty fogging/hazing and there were what looked like water marks and streaking from something not being dried properly.
When I contacted AAC (Jonathan) about this issue, he initially told me that in 10 years they have never encountered something like this and would look into it for me. A few days later I talked to Jonathan again and he basically told me I was SOL with a warranty claim as I should have taken the lights out of the box right away and installed them because the foam packing material caused a chemical reaction that caused the fogging and hazing.
After a few more e-mail back and forth, Jonathan did offer to "try and clean" the lenses for me but he wasn't sure if that would work. That option was going to cost me several hundred dollars in shipping charges as well as for their time to clean the lenses, so I opened the lights myself and cleaned them with some rubbing alcohol. A little fine rubbing compound later and my lights are almost crystal clear now. Total cost $2.99 for the bottle of rubbing alcohol and about two hours of my time on a Sunday morning!
By the way, the harness that AAC included with my Bi Xenon kit had no provision for the high beam function on the driver side!!!! They told me that I had to tap into the stock harness myself.....what a joke! You can pick up a proper H13 Bi Xenon harness on eBay for about $10.00 or you can contact The Retrofit Source and purchase one of their Bi-Xenon MotoControl harnesses for about $35.00.
One more thing to note, these lights and the supplied harness don't work properly with the DRL feature on Canadian cars. My lights only worked if it was dark out or if the dash switch was turned to the full on position, any other setting would cause the lights to flicker.
If it wasn't for the help I received from Ofer (2SSRS) and the custom harness he made to correct my problem, I would have ripped my lights out a long time ago and chalked up the $1300.00 loss as a very expensive lesson about what vendor (AAC) never to deal with again!
Steve
PS
As for the issue that Shazam613 is having with his bulbs being glued in, I think it's either POS quality control or someone at AAC trying to avoid a similar issue to mine coming back to them.