I took my '95 850 in to have the burned out lights in the climate control replaced. The entire unit was black except the small yellow LED for the recirculate switch. The dealer replaced the light bulbs, but claims the blue LED for the AC switch is part of a $200 switch module. Is there some way to replace the blue LED?
Can you take it apart and resolder a new one in? Those blue LEDs are the most expensive ones, but they are only a few bucks (as opposed to less then one dollar for something like a red one)... The thing is tho, I have doubts that it burnt out, LEDs have a lifespan of over 20 years! - something burnt it out (too much current) or the connection has gone bad... so it might be nessessary to buy the module... tho at $200 for a switch module I would live with out it.
LED's almost never burn out unless abused by a bad design, they should last around 100k hours which is far longer than your car will last. Perhaps it's actually an incandescent lamp? Often they're burried in switches and not meant to be replaced, however it's not particularly difficult to get most of them apart and they can be replaced with an LED and resistor.
On my old 1991 Golf, it used LED's to display what was going on, a green one to indicate turn signal activity, a red for coolant temp, oil pressure, and generator failure, and a blue one for its highbeams are on lamp (and yellow for the glow plug/water separator lamp on diesels).... It was pretty dim, I've seen much brigher ones in my friends two Jetta's (a 1990, and a
1991)... Sure as hell looked like a blue LED tho.... Maybe super bright blue LEDs haven't been on the market since 1998-2000 but the low intensity ones seem to have been... all you really need for a switch, or a function indicator lamp.
BTW, yes I am aware that blue is a more difficult colour of LED to make, and that even in super bright format the blue ones are still quite a bit less bright then the other colours.
Robert: I would agree that the light in the Climate Control is not an LED, but they got to market a little sooner than 2000. I tinker around with some of these and make some lights for my Grandkids to play with. ( they think its pretty cool & its a good mental excersize for me.) I offer the following for your perusal.
Commercially viable blue LEDs based on the wide bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride were invented by Shuji Nakamura while working in Japan at Nichia Corporation in 1993 and became widely available in the late 1990s. They can be added to existing red and green LEDs to produce white light. Most "white" LEDs in production today use a 450nm - 470nm blue GaN (gallium nitride) LED covered by a yellowish phosphor coating usually made of cerium doped yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG:Ce) crystals which have been powdered and bound in a type of viscous adhesive. The LED chip emits blue light, part of which is converted to yellow by the YAG:Ce. The single crystal form of YAG:Ce is actually considered a scintillator rather than a phosphor. Since yellow light stimulates the red and green receptors of the eye, the resulting mix of blue and yellow light gives the appearance of white.
White LEDs can also be made by coating near ultraviolet (NUV) emitting LEDs with a mixture of high efficiency europium based red and blue emitting phosphors plus green emitting copper and aluminium doped zinc sulfide (ZnS:Cu,Al). This is a method analogous to the way fluorescent lights work.
The newest method used to produce white light LEDs uses no phosphors at all and is based on homoepitaxially grown zinc selenide (ZnSe) on a ZnSe substrate which simultaneously emits blue light from its active region and yellow light from the substrate.
There were no white LEDs until the blue LED was invented. What they did to make white was to use a white phosphor on an LED but the quality was poor and the life was substandard. The VW probably used colored miniature tungsten lamps similar to the ones in MagLites.
Sure they have been, bright blue LED's matured around '95, dimmer ones were around several years prior to that. I remember though at one point they were something like $40 each.
White LED's are blue LED's with a phosphor to emit white light. Blue LED's are usually water clear when off, but I do have one that's milky blue diffused.
My '95 850 without automatic climate control had a blue indicator lamp to tell when the AC was on. It doesn't function any more. The Volvo garage called it an LED and said it was part of the switch module. The panel has since informed me that blue LED's were in their infancy in '95 and probably not in Volvos. However, it still had a blue lamp of some kind.
It's probably a blue incandescent lamp, if you can find a used switch in a junkyard I can replace the lamp for you, or retrofit it with an LED if desired.
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