ORACLE Lighting’s own Justin “JP” Perret sits down with SunCruiser Media’s 4WD Podcast.
ORACLE Lighting’s very own Justin “JP” Perret was a recent guest on the SunCruiser Media 4WD podcast with host Perry Mack. JP brings over 10 years of experience as part of the ORACLE Lighting team and has worn many hats, from installer to product specialist. You might recognize him as he even stars in many of our installation and product information videos. The SunCruiser Media 4WD podcast is aptly named as it is all about off-roading and JP discusses how ORACLE Lighting can take your off-roading experience to the next level.
In this podcast JP and Perry discuss LED Lighting for off-road vehicles such as Jeeps and Broncos as well as RAM TRX, Ford F-150, and Super Duty. Whether it be a LED Light Bar, Rock Lights, or Mirror Ditch Lights for your off-road vehicle, ORACLE Lighting offers many upgrades for you. As disussed in the podcast, many of our products are plug and play and ORACLE Lighting’s support staff is here for you if you run into any issues.
Justin "JP" Perret
Below are some excerpts from the podcast or you can listen or watch in its entirety HERE.
Q: So how do I choose a light bar then? Where do I start with lumens or whatever other specs? What am I looking for for a good roof-mounted light bar?
JP: Yeah, so we tend to look at lumens and lux. So for example, our 50 inch MRFT light bar, which is our latest light bar design, it uses reflector facing LED technology, provides a combination driving beam angle and for that one specifically we get you get a usable light distance at over 648 meters so it translates to about you know roughly 2,000 feet.
Q: And one of the things that I noticed driving here in British Columbia, I've had elk come out at me across the front of my truck. Is that kind of a beam pattern gonna light up the sides of the roads and into the forest so that I can see him before I hit him?
JP: No, so particularly what you'd want to use for something like that would be a ditch light, is typically what they're referred to, or a ditch type light. It's typically a flood pattern and you know typically or traditionally ditch lights were you know just an a flood auxiliary light that would be mounted to the sides of the vehicle with some sort of bracket. we actually, we took an interesting take on that to do more of an integrated look. Because what we find and what our design philosophy usually is, is to try to develop products that look more like they're supposed to be there and less than an afterthought. So in terms of ditch lights, what that led us to were, we've designed a series of replacement front mirror caps for the side view mirrors that have ditch lights integrated into them… And we offer those for you know all of the more popularly off-roaded vehicles like the Jeeps. You know we we offer that for the Jeep JK, the JL and the Gladiator, the Ford Bronco, the Ford F-150 and Super Duty. We've got them coming for the fifth-gen rams like the TRX. Tons of development going on there.
Q: Why would I pay $400 for a light where I might see something similar for $100? So what am I getting for $300 more?
JP: A lot of the things that you're getting, obviously you're gonna get a better quality product. You're just, when you're talking about the actual internal components used. you're going to have something that's assembled with components that are of a higher quality in that higher range than you are with something in that lower range… You know, you got to kind of question, you know, what components are actually being used in that. And then as far as the things that aren't necessarily tangible, you know, just speaking in terms of our company, you know, you get, we put a ton of resources into actual support around the product, installation assistance. you know, like you mentioned in the introduction, part of what I do is shooting a lot of educational and install content for these products. And we have a full staff of tech support that can actually help the DIYer get the install done if he ends up in a jam. You know, so there's a lot of things that go into the product that are not necessarily the tangible thing that you pull out of the box, right. And I think that's the big the big factor that separates a company like us to your standard just blue label product.
Q: So as the scene lighting, so two issues that I encounter. One is backing up on the trail at night. And I've taken, unfortunately, a solid steel bumper. But I've hit stumps, I've hit trees. It's just so hard to see with the OEM backup lights. Is the scene light the kind of thing you'd recommend for additional lighting for backup lights?
JP: Depending on the vehicle, yeah. You know, we also make some integrated auxiliary reverse light options for vehicles like the newer Jeep Wrangler and the Jeep Gladiator, where we actually we made a set of light modules that replaced the factory reflectors in the bumper, and those integrate in with the reverse lights for the tail lights. And then those provide... I've gotten some reviews, I've read some reviews where people are like, man, it looks like it's still daytime in my rear view camera. And that's inherently, you know, a thing that we've come across with a lot of the newer OEs lately is that the reverse light, the reverse camera. At night, it's just, you know, in combination with the factory reverse lighting is just sub par. It's not very good. You know, so we would definitely look into solving that. issue with reverse lighting and products like our our new flush mount tail lights. Those have high powered reverse light modules built in our bumper reverse lights like I mentioned the scene lights are great for that. Even using standard 3x3 cubes in the rear are better than OEM in most instances.
Q: And since you mentioned a controller, a lot of these lighting systems that we're talking about, and we could be putting on cube lights on the front for ditch lighting, an LED light bar, perhaps at the headlight level. We've got some reverse lights going on now. We've got underbody lighting. It's starting to sound complicated. Is it still a do-it-yourself project for a guy to put all this stuff in?
JP: Absolutely. So, you know, especially like our Oculus headlights, those are virtually plug and play. So are our, you know, we've also got some really cool Ford lighting fog light products, like our triple fog light kit for the Ford Bronco, which those mount up to the steel modular bumper, just using the factory hardware that's already there. Plug and play connectors, same with the high powered fog lights for the Jeep. Everything that we do, we try to make this plug and play as possible. We are very much on the side of the DIYers. That's, you know, something that we've, you know, we came up as DIYers. You know, the founder of our company started the company, you know, just, you know, building headlights at his fraternity house, just doing it himself. So, you know, we're very big on that.
You can listen or watch the podcast in its entirety HERE