I recently got my blendmount for my Escort Redline and was looking ot mount it up without having any wires cluttering up my dashboard so I decided to tap the power off the courtesy lights by the rear view mirror.

The lights pop right off by pulling down on them along the edge that faces the back of the car. Once that pulls out you will see that there is 3 wires feeding the lights - black, red, yellow. The black one is the ground, the red is + power and the yellow one is the dimmer circuit (I believe). I tapped off the red wire twice, once for my radar detector and one for a usb power cable that powers my phone on a window mount. You can get ground from any of the screws going into the sheetmetal behind the dome lights.

Once you tap the positive and ground the negative to the sheet metal all you have to do is to slide the end of the power cord between the headliner and the window and snap the light back in its place. You could store the extra wire between the headliner and the sheet metal of the car as there is a ton of space up there. I have done this on a couple of my cars now and I have never had any problems doing so. IF you are concerned about power draw you can place a fuse inline on positive but I don't. I rely on the fused circuit in the car as the Radar Detector and USB power draw very little current.

 

won't your radar dector stay on all the time then?

 

No I edited the post and inserted a video of it working.

 

Sorry for bringing up an old post, but I've been trying to install my radar detector. I've pulled the dome light/mic/sunroof switch down and probed around. It seems that the red wire is always on - How do you get it to turn off with the car?

I've also looked at the schematics but it doesn't look like any other wire would provide ignition +12V.

Thanks for the help!

 

any updates or pics for this?