Simple electrical problem.. dash lights are out

[chibahawk 10+ year member]

Ok so I just hooked up an MTX Thunder 2150X for some CDT components.. everything works fine, but at night I realized I had blown the dash lighting.. but it seems as though all my fuses for my dash are still okay. What could I have messed up that would've affected this?

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[Hydrastas 10+ year member]

The same thing happened to me a few days ago, i looked for blown fuses as well and couldn't find any, however the only thing that I recently did that might have caused that problem was when I changed the location of my ground in the trunk... I'm not sure if that is why my dash lights went out or not though, im going to run a 1/0 gauge wire from my ground on the battery itself and i'll post if it fixes the problem, maybe it's just ironic that both our dash lights with extremely long bulb life burnt out around the same time.

 

[chibahawk 10+ year member]

yea i was thinking about whether or not my ground is good. it would probably be in my best interests to run wire to the battery but I just dont have the space to run it or the wire either

 

[Hydrastas 10+ year member]

Before going through the hassel of wiring a ground to the battery, I looked in my owners manual and found out that there was more fuses than i thought, there was another fuse box on the passanger side that had the dash lights fuse and it was blown. On my car, there are several different fuses for the same things, you might double check every fuse. If it was a ground problem then the excess current going into the ground could have found it's way to your fuse block and blown one of the smaller fuses such as your dash lights before it grounded through the tires... not for sure. Perhaps another reason could be if your head unit is not very secure, and it moved a little and perchance caused your illumination wire to come in contact with ground if you didn't use that wire or just clipped it off...there could be several wires leading back to the lights that you might have just clipped off or something and if they came in contact with ground then your dash lights going out would most likely result, but in any case it would have blown a fuse, and if not then the only other thing i can think of is your bulbs actually burning out from an excess current before a fuse was blown. Good luck with this problem, I'm out of ideas.