My wife has a 2003 Murano and quite frankly the halogen bulbs suck. I decided to look into doing the conversion. I talked to a dealer to see if they could do it and how much it would be and they quoted me over $1300. They were telling me they would have to put in the new housings, a new wiring harness, and a new computer. "Funk that", I said.

I then searched around online junkyards (www.junkyarddog.com IIRC) and found a place that had two of them. They quoted me 300 each and I offered them $400 for the pair which they accepted. This included the housings, the attached ballasts, and all bulbs except for the Xenon bulbs.

I then ordered some OEM Xenon bulbs from Daniel Stern lighting (awesome guy, btw - knows his stuff). $158 for 2 bulbs. I honestly don't remember if they're H1/H6 or what. I knew then.

So ventured out to check the connector in hopes that it would be a straight plug and play. To my delight the old connector fit the new housing! GREAT!

After I received the new bulbs I installed the bulbs (careful not to touch the bulb with my fingers - that's a big NO-NO) and then went out to put the new housings in. Well, it wasn't as easy to take them out as just removing a few screws. I was able to access the screws on the top but there is a bolt on the back side and one on the front side. The front bolt was accessible by taking off the front grill - somewhat of an annoyance but do-able in about 10 minutes with some clue as to what you are looking for.

The rear bolt (more specifically the side near the wheel well) was more of a challenge to get to. I ended up turning the wheel to gain access, pulled back the splash guard in the wheel well, and found that bolt. I had to use a ratcheting box end "happy wrench" to get it off - it was a PITA but it came off with some work. At that point all bolts were off and the housing was free to move around. I went to remove it from it's place only to find out that the support beam going from above the radiator curving around to the side was blocking removal of the housing. "Great" I thought - another thing to remove. They came off easy, though. 2 bolts and they're off. I had to take one off each side. So finally the housings were able to be removed. I put the new ones in place (or rather connected up the harness to test to make sure it actually worked). Turn signals, parking lights, regular lights - everything worked.

So I set the lights in place, put the bolts back in (the ones on top, the one in front, and the one on the side), put the support members back in, put the splash guard back in place, fastened those fasteners, put the grill back on and I was good to go.

From start to finish actually putting the lights in the car took me about 2.5 hours but that's because I was scratching my head a good majority of the time trying to figure out why the light wasn't coming loose, found the side bolt, tried to figure out how I was going to get to that bolt, etc... Now knowing how to do it I would say it would take about an hour.

So I had everything put back together and informed my wife that everything was working. All that had to be done now as to aim the bulb shades later when it was dark so as to get good range but not blind people. That was easily achieved by turning using a phillips head and turning the shade varying knob - it's a little cogged plastic thing accessable from the top. Turn it one way and the shade goes up, turn it the other way and it goes down. There's also another one to vary them in / out but I didn't have to mess with that one.

Well, I thought I was done. Nope. We later found out that when the high beams were pressed the lights would shut off. No high beam bulbs either. This seemed strange to me. I did some research and found out that for high beams on the Murano with Xenon bulbs, it actually moves the bulb shade up so as to project the light upwards more. It basically moves the cutoff up. The pinout of the connector is the same as the halogen with one exception. In the halogen bulb one pin goes to the low beam filament and another goes to the high beam filament. When you switch to high beams on the halogen setup the low beams turn off and the highs turn on. On the HID version, the "low" powers the ballast which keeps the light on and the "high" actually powers the high beam solenoid which actuates the bulb shade and moves it up. So in the HID setup the lows have to stay on all the time basically. Great, how to change that?

In order to get this to work it is first important to understand from where it is controlled. There is a little box in the engine bay to the left of the plastic cover over the engine. It's about 2" x 6" plastic cover with a bulge on the left side with some wires coming out. That is the IPDM or Intelligent Power Distribution Module. I looked in the factory service manual to find this out. Basically it is a board with a CPU, some relays, and some fuses. The way it controls the lighting is that it switches the grounds for the two lighting relays. The CPU is different between halogen / xenon in that it switches the ground for the low on only when in low beam operation and then off when in high beam operation on the halogen setup. The xenon setup maintains the ground switched for both high and low beam operation. As you recall, the "low" stays on but the "high" actually actuates the bulb shade solenoid in the xenon version. The fix was quite easy though a little complicated to get to. The IPDM needs to come out. Taking it out is easy.

To take the IPDM out you lift the two tabs and pull the top cover off. this will expose the IPDM. There is another little cover over the wiring harnesses that you will also have to remove. In order to get to those clips you'll have to loosen and move (not remove) the coolant reservior - 2 8mm bolts (IIRC). Move that, remove the 2nd little cover and you'll be able to pull the IPDM up a little to gain access to all the plugs. Disconnect the plugs (don't worry about which one is in where - they only plug back into one place - they can't be put back wrong). So pull them out and then the IPDM will come out.



Once that is out you'll have to remove the bottom cover of the IPDM. In order to do that you'll have to have 4 thin "things" to put in the 4 clip holes. I cut a wire hanger into 4 short pieces and pushed them through. There are 4 more small clips that you can't fit the hanger through but you can put them in the large end and then pry it off with a small screwdriver. Remove those 4 in sequence and the bottom cover will come off. Don't worry - almost there.

Once the bottom cover is off you'll have to take all the relays and fuses out. Take a picture as to how they are in there or set them out in the same configuration in which you remove them - whatever way works so that you'll put them back in correctly. Some of the relays are in there quite stiffly so they might require some needle nose pliers or vice grips or something. Don't crush them - just put enough clamping force on them so you can wiggle them out.

Okay, so the relays and fuses are out. Now you can just lift the top cover off and you'll see all the relay connectors and wire traces. The CPU and associated circuitry is under the plastic cover still in place. The two contacts that you'll be concerned with are on the low beam relay and the high beam relay which if the CPU is situated on the bottom left are the top right two most relays (low on top then high underneath it).

To make it so the lows stay on when the high is turned on you'll have to install a diode from the low beam terminal to the high beam terminal. See here:





What I ended up doing was bending the diode leads such that about 1/4" would go down into the plastic to seat it against the proper connectors and then dabbed just a tiny bit of solder on there to hold it in. If you are sure to get it down in you probably don't need solder - I just did it for good measure since I had some handy. Make sure you put some electrical tape on the trace that will be under the diode so it doesn't short out. You'll also have to clip / file / dremel out a little bit of the plastic on the cover that you will put back on to prevent it from placing force on the diode leads. This will all be revealed as you start actually looking at it.

So you have the diode in - now you have to put everything back together. Re-install the IPDM cover, put the relays and fuses back in, put it back in the slot, reconnect the wiring harnesses, put the covers back on the IPDM, reinstall the coolant reservoir, and make sure if you spilled any coolant you clean it up.

Start it up and test them out. You should maintain your lights on and you'll hear the bulb shades reposition when you go to high beam operation. That's it - you're done.

In retrospect I know that pictures would have been a lot more help. At the time I was doing it I wasn't quite sure what avenue I was going to be taking and didn't even know with 100% certainty that it was going to actually work. If anyone is interested in doing this and is in the Northern VA area I would be more than happy to help and then we can document it with pictures. You'll have to of course get everything beforehand.

To recap:$400 - Murano Xenon housings with ballasts from a junkyard. Lowball them - they might go for it!$158 - Set of proper HID bulbs from http://www.danielsternlighting.com (You'll have to email him - the bulbs aren't for sale on his web site but he does sell them)$2 - Standard diodes from radio shack. I used 1A diodes but they really only need to be rated for about 100mA.Some time and patience.

I would guess that for a first timer doing this entire thing would take about 6 hours total for everything. Don't forget though that you can break it up in two pieces - the light install and then the high beam fix.

If you have any questions feel free to post here or PM me and I will certainly help you out. Also, if you live in NoVA and want to talk about it PM me and I'll either give you a call or give you my number and you can call me.

Happy modding!

-Jason

--- Additions / modifications made on 9/18/2010 by <other_user> ---
1. The back of the circuit plate has the inscription HH2 and HL1 on bottom end. Those leads represent the high and low beams respectively. Those relays will be the second and third relays instead of top two right most as per your direction.

2. Underneath the top and bottom plates that the relays seat on, the HH2 and HL1 leads have tiny holes that are visible between these plates. Bending the leads of the diode, I inserted them between these holes and the diode fits perfectly between the plate without having to solder anything.

3. The cathode end of the diode goes towards the high beam (HH2) terminal with the anode towards the low beam(HL1).

Jason

Hello, I have a customer that is doing this same type of transfer from regular lights to Zenon and I sent him your instructions and he says that now the lights do not work at all. Do you have any tips on what could be the problem.

Thank YouRobert Franauto

well, unfortunately due to the many different possibilities of what could go wrong, there is of course no way to tell what went wrong. I mean a relay might have been damaged during removal (although unlikely - they are pretty rugged), something in the IPDM could have failed, the diode could be bad, ballasts might not work, etc.

Depending on the resources available, I'd suggest trying to narrow it down to individual components. Here are some some possibilities off the top of my head:

-It's possible that the ballasts on the headlights are either missing or broken. If they were obtained from a junk yard this is especially a possibility.-The IPDM might have been damaged in some way during the removal / replacement of fuses and relays.-Fuses / relays may not have gone back in the same orientation (or perhaps something's not installed snugly enough).-Diode could be failed in some way (not making contact, installed backwards, shorted, open, etc)......... - I should mention here that if it's at all possible to find a friend with the same year Murano and you can swap IPDMs to eliminate that as a possibility, that would be the easiest way to figure out if the issue lies in the IPDM somewhere.

I'd try just removing the headlight connector from the back of the Xenon ones that your customer got and plug them back into the stock ones and try the normal headlights (not high beams) since the circuitry is the same when in low beam mode. If this works then the Xenon lamp balllasts would be very suspect in my opinion. If they don't work, well, this would start to concern me as it would start to point towards the IPDM. This is when I would try to find someone who could loan their IPDM to me for a quick swap test.

I'll do a little more thinking but it would helpful if you or your customer would possibly post troubles they had during the performance, anything they think they may have messed up, anything that they thought needed clarification during performance, or any troubleshooting they did themselves to try to figure out the problem.

I hope you guys are able to figure it out without having to spend too much time / money. :T

Good luck!

-Jason

I'd be interested to find out if anyone else has attempted this and done it successfully. I know it seems daunting at first (probably especially so now that the first reply is a pretty bad idsue) but when you get into it, it's really not that bad. Honestly, the hardest part was getting the lights out / in and the research I had to do (and reverse engineering) to find out how to make the circuitry work.

-Jason

hello my question is did you also install the switch for the xenon lights ,I mean the lights leveller,that's the one witch is inside the car, please let me know thanks

No, I thought I mentioned that but looking back, I guess I didn't. I had to manually set them but once they were set one time, I didn't have to mess with them again. You simply take a philips head and look down on the back of the light and you'll see white "gears". My suggestion is to pull up within range of a wall or garage and turn the screwdriver in one direction or the other. Pay attention to how many times you turn it and watch the light beam. If it's going the wrong direction ... go the other way. Do this for both lights until they're the preferred height.

My apologies for not including this to begin with - I totally forgot about it.

-Jason

thankyou for very fast answer ,but I have to have the lights done with the leveler ,i'm taking the car with me to the europe and I would not pass the inspection

I imagine you could probably get a leveler as an addon module. I believe it just requires power and has plugs into the lights. You might be able to add that after the fact.

I didn't even give that any thought since it's not required here in the US.

-Jason

hello jason can you call me or send me your phone # on my email ([email protected]) I have some more question about wiring the lights ,again thankyou
Modified by pavel at 1:30 PM 1/27/2007

moved this to the articles forum.......

Hi there,
Reviving an old thread and looking for expert help as I have been searching with no luck. So before I attempt to compare wiring etc...If I have a complete Murano with Xenon lights, has anyone switched over wiring etc, so the HID's are full factory without any modification (without using a relay or diode).

As I may sell the other Murano, I would also be looking to switch the halogens over to the Murano that had the HID's came from...maybe lol

Thanks!