Osram Night Breaker Bulbs

Frankly I was getting sick of the bulbs blowing I got from aceparts.com, they were Ice White Xenon filled bulbs, you can see them in this post - Xenon Headlight Bulbs.

I had six of them blow in just over six months, they do look great but getting through one per month is unacceptable.

I decided to go completely the other end of the spectrum in terms of price, hoping that the old saying of "you get what you pay for" was true, and go for some Osram Night Breaker Plus bulbs.

I went on the hunt to find the best price I could, as I had seen they were selling them on eurocarparts for a rather high price of £17.99. Turning to eBay I found a set for a more palatable £12.90 posted from the seller autoperformanceonline.

The bulbs arrived in very sturdy packaging, inspiring some confidence that they haven't been bashed around all the way from the factory.



As one of the old bulbs had blown I went straight out and fitted the new Osrams. It was immediately obvious that they were less white/blue than the old bulbs but a heck of a lot brighter.

Comparing the bulbs you can see the quality difference. Osram on the right, old bulb on the left.


After three months of use I can say I'm very happy with how they perform. At night they produce a much more useful spread of light on the road, making driving much more comfortable when on dimly lit roads.

Below is an image of the Osrams fitted against my white LED sidelights, the image is quite deceiving as the bulbs most definitely produce a yellow light not white as it looks below. However, what you can see is how bright they are. Overall I am very happy with the Osram Night Breaker Plus bulbs and would definitely recommend them to everyone, in this case it seems you do get what you pay for.





134k Service

I'm afraid I've been a bit slack in typing up this service, I actually did it way back in June 2012, nevertheless, still important to talk about it.

I'd done 10k miles since the last service - 124k Mile Full Service - and I wanted to keep the services nice and regular. Since the car had well over 100k miles on the clock and I had no intention of getting rid any time soon this seemed like a sensible figure.

I purchased the parts from three different places eurocarparts.com, opieoils.co.uk and Costco.

As far as I could tell from the car service history, no-one had ever replaced the transmission oil, so I wanted to make sure I swapped that out this time. I headed over to opieoils and asked one of their members of staff for support on choosing the correct one for the 330d manual 5 speed box, they suggested Fuchs Titan Sintofluid SAE 75W-80.

I got all the filters from eurocarparts.com, using a 25% discount from being a member over at bimmerforums.co.uk. I went for all brand name parts to hopefully ensure quality.

Finally I got the oil from Costco as usual, they seem to be consistently £10 per tub cheaper than anywhere else for Castrol Edge.

The full list of parts then;

  • Castrol Edge 5W-40 A3/B4 Fully Synthetic Oil
  • Fuchs Titan Sintofluid SAE 75W-80 Transmission Oil
  • Hengst Oil Filter E15H D59
  • Bosch Air Filter
  • Bosch Cabin Filter

So a quick snap of the time and mileage on the OBC before I started for the records.



As I hadn't changed the gearbox oil before on the 330d, I decided that should be the first job on the list. To get at the gearbox you need to remove a few under-car panels and heat shields.


With the gearbox now accessible, it needed to be drained of the old oil. To do this you need to remove the drain plug and filler plug. (Circled in the image below).


Now, as you can't get any liquid higher than the filler plug you can't use gravity to fill it, so using a bit of Blue Peter magic, here is a oil pump my Dad fashioned earlier. It's basically an empty Shampoo bottle with a pump action top and a length of tube cable tied to it.


Using the Shampoo bottle, the gearbox was refilled with oil, until it overflowed from the filler plug aperture.


Transmission out of the way, I could get on with the rest of the service. First out was the cabin filter (to gain access to the air filter).

The cabin filter was surprisingly dirty actually, some of the troughs filled with leaves and other road debris. It's worth pointing out the obvious here though, the old filter was never white, it was grey to begin with.



As usual the air filter was very dirty and ready to be replaced. The intake on the E46 seems to allow quite a large amount of debris to get up and into the air filter compared to a few other cars I have worked on. Contrary to the cabin filter, the old air filter was actually white, so you can see how dirty that has gotten.


Finally the oil and oil filter were replaced, as with the air filter, the oil filter was looking particularly clogged up.


As always servicing the car improved the engine smoothness, which is always welcome. As for changing the gearbox oil, I can confirm that it did indeed make a noticeable difference to gear change ease and cold start characteristics, so well worth it in my opinion.

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