I'm familiar with Disasters link, and I've read it many times in the last year and a half.
Regarding my fogs.....I have 4300K HID's for the fogs, so they match the factory HID head lights.
Since install I have only been flashed by another driver once. That's it. With that said, I would disagree that they are all glare.
I can see the glare in your posted video...especially when you go off angle the the fogs still glare, compared to the headlights.
Just because you have only been flashed once, doesn't mean you aren't causing issues for other drivers. I gave up flashing people because that only seems to cause them to flip their high beams at me, to show they are already on low, which blinds me worse. Glare is much worse for drivers with glasses, ocular surgery, people with cataracts (anyone who has any thing that fractures light) and older drivers (who have longer recovery times.)
I tend to defer to the experts on such matters. To ignore them requires serious rationalization. The best experts, besides Daniel Stern I linked to, are the folks at the Candlepower Automotive forums. These are industry lighting experts. You can find lots of threads discussing why HID's in reflective housings are bad...including fog housings, or sign up and post your own question.
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=87
Here is a summary of the reasons you should not put HID's in your lights, including your fog lights.
1. It is illegal and you could get a ticket.
2. It hurts other driver's night vision and could cause them to get in an accident.
3. It does not improve your visibility because the reflective halogen housings were not designed for HID's arc location and therefore do not focus the HID light properly, causing hot spots. These close hot spots cause your eyes to lose their dark adaption and constrict your pupils such that you see less in the darker areas, and further away. You actually lose distance and side vision.
4. To counter the inevitable scatter, from putting HID's in halogen housings some people will aim their lights lower. This exacerbates the loss of distance vision even more.
5. HIR halogen lights are available in many applications. HIR's are 80-110% brighter than standard halogens and don't cause any of the issues that HID's do because they put the filament in the correct location (actually, some of them align the filament even more precisely which is part of the reason for their improvement.)
Here is Daniel Stern's write up on fog lamps.
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/lights/fog_lamps/fog_lamps.html
"Good (and legal) fog lamps produce white or Selective Yellow light, and use tungsten-halogen bulbs. Xenon or HID bulbs are inherently unsuitable for use in fog lamps, and blue or other-colored lights are also the wrong choice.
The fog lamps' job is to show you the edges of the road, the lane markings, and the immediate foreground. When used in combination with the headlamps, good fog lamps weight the overall beam pattern towards the foreground so that even though there may be a relatively high level of upward stray light from the headlamps causing glareback from the fog or falling rain or snow, there will be more foreground light than usual without a corresponding increase in upward stray light, giving back some of the vision you lose to precipitation.
When used without headlamps in conditions of extremely poor visibility due to snow, fog or heavy rain, good fog lamps light the foreground and the road edges only, so you can see your way safely at reduced speeds.
In clear conditions, more foreground light is not a good thing, it's a bad thing. Some foreground light is necessary so you can use your peripheral vision to see where you are relative to the road edges, the lane markings and that pothole 10 feet in front of your left wheels. But foreground light is far less safety-critical than light cast well down the road into the distance, because at any significant speed (much above 30 mph), what's in the foreground is too close for you to do much about. If you increase the foreground light, your pupils react to the bright, wide pool of light by constricting, which in turn substantially reduces your distance vision—especially since there's no increase in down-the-road distance light to go along with the increased foreground light. It's insidious, because high levels of foreground light give the illusion, the subjective impression, of comfort and security and "good lighting"."
So why do people do it?
1. It is cool to have new technology in your car...the same technology that is in BMW's and Mercedes.
2. It is cheap. Kits are as low as $30.
3. It is easy. Just a few
plugs and wire hookups and you are good to go.
4. People are ignorant of the consequences of their actions to themselves and others.
5. People think HID's actually help them see better at night because it looks so much brighter in front of their cars. They don't realize how they have compromized their vision, in the distance and in the darker areas of the poor beam spill.
6. People love to "upgrade" their cars, and HID's are a cheap "upgrade."
I leave you with Daniel Stern's final words on the matter.
"The only safe and legitimate HID retrofit is one that replaces the entire headlamp—that is lens, reflector, bulb...the whole system—with optics designed for HID usage. In the aftermarket, it is possible to get clever with the growing number of available products, such as Hella's modular projectors available in HID or halogen, and fabricate your own brackets and bezels, or to modify an original-equipment halogen headlamp housing to contain optical "guts" designed for HID usage (though it should be noted that "cooking" the lens off a composite headlamp, installing HID optics and re-sealing the lens creates major problems of its own, and does not result in a legal headlamp).
Please note: From time to time, I am asked to comment on what are marketed as "new developments" in HID kits, and those asking sometimes point out to me that these "new developments" might render this article out-of-date, since the copyright date on the article is older than the date of these "new developments". Please understand, marketeers will always be coming up with dazzling new pseudoscience, tempting new hype and sneaky new ways of trying to convince you to buy their stuff. It's what they do. This article will never go out of date, because the problems with HID kits are conceptual problems, not problems of implementation. Therefore, they cannot be overcome by additional research and development, any more than someone could develop a way for you to put on somebody else's eyeglasses and see correctly."
Sounds like you have other plans for the bulbs vs using them for the fog lights. BTW, 8500K will be like you have your fogs lights off, they'll be so dim. I couldn't stand the 5500K that I bought which is why I bought HID @ 4300 like the stock headlights and now I can see
