Astra X Reg: Dipped Lights too low

There should be a couple of scroll wheels by the headlight switch. One controls the brightness of the dash, and the other controls the alignment on the dipped beam.

HTH

Should be on '0' for normal use. Only use the higher numbers if you have a decent load in the back.

You have tried cleaning them? It's winter and they may need cleaning every day.

Thanks for the replies but I should have written out all this first; The problem has been with the car since we bought it 2nd hand (almost

I really think the solution requires physical adjustment of the lights direction.

Does any> > > Hi all,

Look at the back of the lamp unit - is there a small vertical cogwheel, probably blue in colour, which meshes with another one at right angles, probably black?

And - above the lamp, is there a hole in the cross panel, possibly with a bung in it?

Remove the bung and look down the hole - there's a small plastic screw that will take an Allen key - this is the top of the black cogwheel. If you turn this screw with an Allen key, it will in turn turn the blue cog around and swivel the lamp unit up and down.

And the cog is the think that adjusts the vertical aim of the headlamp.

(I'm making an assumption here that your X-reg car is the same as my @02 reg one)

The rest is easy - just like the old way of adjusting headlamps.

Mine were pointing at different angles - so what I did was find a brick wall where the horizontal mortar line was the right height (a bit of guesswork here, but in my case I used the cut-off line of the light that was set correctly to judge this), set the electronic adjuster to 1, then adjusted the lamp that was pointing down too far until it was the same as the one that looked right.

Then parked behind a parked car on a level road , put the lamps on dipped, and made sure that the beam was not too high i.e did not shine above the rear window panel.

The electronic adjuster is great, because if you haven't got it quite right you can always experiment, but still adjust the lamps while driving to make sure they are high enough without causing problems to others.

The message from "mrcheerful ." contains these words:

They always seem woefully low to me when the MOT bloke's happy with 'em.

Is it a fail then for being slightly too low, like it is for too high ?

well the beam setter has an area that the light should be within, so I would GUESS that too low could be a failure.

mrcheerful

I think all they are interested in at the MOT stage is whether they are likely to dazzle oncoming drivers.

It all gets a bit interesting I should think if the lights are adjustable ...

The message from "R. Murphy" contains these words:

Well, sort of. They have to show a definite pattern and the cut-off has to not come above a certain angle. Provided your car's new enough to have such fancy things as beam patterns.

Not so. I've had cars failed for "failure to throw the beam pattern", and one adjusted at the test centre because it was too low.