Having needed light when loading or using the bed of a pick-up truck is a necessity. Truck manufacturers starting installing back-of-the-cab lighting a long time ago to help address the problem. That’s good.
Since then, truck bed covers, in a variety of styles and materials, have become quite popular. That’s good too. They keep the contents of the bed protected from prying eyes, keep moisture, wind, and dust off items in the back, and they improve gas mileage. All good.
But, with the cover in place, and darkness coming on or firmly in place, the inside of the bed under the cover becomes a cave, where the cab light can’t reach.
Once again, some manufacturers have recognized the problem and have started installing lighting packages inside the bed that allows the owner to have lighting at hand without having to have a flashlight.
If your truck doesn’t have this convenient lighting (like ours!), it’s easy to address - and inexpensive too! With the advent of LED (Light-emitting diode) lighting, a lot of light can be had in very little space using very little power.
There are several types of lighting that will do the trick but the main features to look for is easily accessed and replaced batteries, a profile that doesn’t get in the way of the load or the person putting in or taking the load out, and good economics. We found our basic two-light unit for about $6, and with 4 AA batteries, each light cost about $10.
We installed 2 units, one on each side. Because our truck bed has a spray-in liner, the surface would not allow secure attachment of the lights using foam adhesive tabs. So, we affixed them to the underside of the metal folding bed cover. The initial installation looks good, and the light distribution works really well. Time will tell what the temperature extremes of both heat and cold will do the adhesive, batteries, and the unit itself. But for now, we sure like the results.
If you have an approach or product you’d like to talk about, share it in the comments below! Thanks for being a part of the DirtFarmerJay viewer family!
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Welcome to this edition of Truck Life. One of the
accessories we have for our truck is the WeatherTech Tri-Fold Back Cover. Now that's not what we're
going to talk about today, but I am going to talk about what happens when you put that fold down.
That light right back there in the back of the truck doesn't do much good under here because
it's like a cave. Well, we came up with a simple and inexpensive solution. Stay tuned and I'll show
you what it is. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here. Thanks for joining us for this edition of Truck Life.
Well, as I mentioned, we have one of the tri-fold covers that go on the back of the truck, and we
really love it for several reasons. One, it keeps things drier, keeps the wind out of it, and
certainly keeps prying eyes out of it, and you can lock the tailgate, and out of sight, out of mind,
keeps things secure. Here's one thing that doesn't work really well, and that is when it gets dusky
or dark, the cab light in the back there doesn't do any good back here, and you end up with a cave
where it is really dark under here when you're trying to load things or extract things out of
there that you've stored. Well, there's a simple solution, and some of the manufacturers have
already began installing it as a factory, putting lights on the side or under the underside,
and you can find these lights very inexpensively. They're LED, they're battery driven,
and they use adhesive tabs if you want to add that on. Well, let me show you the model that we got.
This is a little GE 6-inch LED light bar. It's got two lights, a little push on and off button.
I've seen other models that look like a light switch. They all work essentially the same.
Doesn't take a lot of batteries, just a few batteries, and the LEDs are very efficient,
and then you stick them on to a surface using a tab or a fastener. Well, what we're going to do
in our case is we're going to add it to the underside of the deck simply because the cobbly
surface of the spray-on bed liner doesn't work really well. I've actually tried sticking these
adhesive tabs and other things and using alcohol, acetone, all sorts of things to clean it. There's
just not enough grabbiness to get that tab, so our fallback position is to place it back under here,
and it's a real simple thing to do. Let's go ahead and put this together. All right, there we have
the light ready to go, and as you can see, it puts out a nice amount of light here. Now to fix it,
what we're going to do is use the little 3M adhesive tabs that were supplied with it.
As you can see, they anticipate you may be mounting this somewhere else, like in a closet
or in a wall somewhere. With those type of anchors, we're not going to use those.
Really fast installation. All right, now we've got that affixed to the case here,
and notice that to change batteries in the future, you're just going to slide the back.
In this case, it'll be affixed. You're going to go ahead and slide the front forward,
take it off, replace the batteries, and then you're going to close it with the tabs and
slide it forward. Of course, the light you get may be slightly different, but the principles are the
same. Now we've got these tabs ready to go. We're going to take the cover sheets off of the back of
the tabs, and in this case, we're going to go ahead and affix them to the underside of our
cover. Well, let's do that really quickly. Make sure that you affix it in such a place that when
you go to remove the cover, if you put it too close, you won't be able to get the cover off
to change the batteries. So I'm going to put it down somewhere about right in here, and we're
going to go ahead and press that on. Now we have a nice solid light there. All right, let's go ahead
and place another one on this side. There we go. All right, so now we have a pair of them right
here, so whatever side of the truck I'm at, I can reach up there. Now, an unknown here. What we don't
know is how heat and cold are going to affect these batteries, so we're going to go ahead and
keep the batteries with us. We just know that we can't affix them on this side without doing some
other surfaces attached there, but this will solve the problem of some of the trips that we're
getting ready to take so that we have good illumination. Well, let's go ahead and close that back up,
and it is daytime right now, so you can see that we have some light under there, but in the night,
this is what it looks like. You get some really nice illumination. It really works well in this
area right here. If you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, won't
you subscribe to our channel? Make sure you ring the bell so that you'll get notified of all the
great videos we're putting out about the shop, the home, Maggie's Kitchen, Truck Life, and great
product reviews. Hey, thanks for watching today. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay
from DirtFarmerJay.com.
