Weird sidelight problem..

[Gmac]

Morning folks,

I’ve been getting intermittent warning of my right parking light out, and now it’s on permanently. So it’s the side light on front right cluster thats not working. Went to put a new bulb in, but it’s still not working. Tried the known good bulb from the other side and still not working, so must be no power getting to it right? Wrong… Ive stuck a voltmeter on it… good side is 11.9v and ‘bad’ side is 10.4v. So not sure why that is.. but it’s making no bulb work?

Any ideas?

tia

 

[northpole]

scrape the metal parts of the connectors clean...spray liberally with an electrical cleaner let it dry than measure the voltage again... should be fine after that.. it's called years of dirt that cause to much resistance. The canbus system turns the power off to the bulb to not damage the wiring.

 

[Gmac]

scrape the metal parts of the connectors clean...spray liberally with an electrical cleaner let it dry than measure the voltage again... should be fine after that.. it's called years of dirt that cause to much resistance. The canbus system turns the power off to the bulb to not damage the wiring.

Thanks, will give that a go. Fingers crossed. I’ll try and get the connectors out of the plastic housing too if i can, to help clean them up and then re-insert.

 

[Gmac]

Turns out it wasn’t corrosion, it was the led bulbs that i was using. It must be that the ‘parking light’ is maybe only on the right hand side, and therefore using the leds had it confused (they obviously aren’t set up to be both a parking light and a sidelight, different voltages i reckon) and as it couldn’t ‘see’ the parking light, it would then cut the power down to 10.4v to protect the circuit. Went back to normal bulbs and the connections are fine. So done away with the attempt to go led for sidelights and back to standard.

 

[northpole]

should've said you were using led lights... imo led position bulbs are always a pita.. they either flicker, or all of a sudden stop working completely or if you have those fancy ones with multiple COB's some of them stop working... I had them on my vectra and still have a setup that puts an extra external resistor in line... those are fine and do work on the audi... but didn't use them for the simple reason, I need to either swap the headlights to oem xenon or go for TRFS's bi-led projectors.... the later is what i'm more inclined to go for and if i got those than I'll put the position led bulbs in.