if your stereo is pushing a LOT of watts maybee damaged your alternator had a friend do that 2 his car

 

the same problem happen to my friend 2000 accord. that was the average amount his dealer wanted to charge him. im not sure bout mitsu dealer. but believe me it wont be cheap getting it fix by dealer.

 

goto shucks or something and have em check that so if it becuse of that you could prob get your dealer 2 warenty it if you put it back 2 stock as far as that goes

 

have you tryed giveing Link a PM??i thought he had all the wireing maps and i know he knows a thing or three about the workings under the dash

 

Any idea what could cause it? It's not like a really horrible prob, as I can still drive my car fine, I just can't see any controls at night. If I route a bunch of LED's into one line, will that eat a bunch of power from the battery?

 

L.E.D.s don't use much power...i have a blinking one on a CD case that has been blinking for 2 years on just 2 AA's so i don't think your getting a power loss through them.you can allways take a reading before the L.E.D.s and one at the end and see how much power has been lost.First i would check that all the L.E.D.s you added still work.if one has gone bad it will break the entire line.good luck

 

Off to radio shack I go.......

 

This thread looks as though it has been dead for a bit... but for future reference of anyone reading it....

LED's cause a voltage drop of about 1.5V (so if you wire into 12V you need to put in line resistors to drop the voltage appropriately. I don't remember what size you need... but maybe start with like a 10 KOhm) and they use like milliamps of current... so you are all good on that...

As far as the dashlight problem. It is possible that you burned out both the lights that do the middash lighting... so I'd just try replacing one of them. After that check that wire harness connection that was mentioned further up in the thread... then the wires go up and over the steering wheels column... you can check those connections too. For some reason I thought there were two fuse blocks in the car... one under the hood and one somewhere else... but I may be smoking something so dont' quote me on it.

Otherwise... take a multimeter and see what kind of voltages you are getting to the connections in the dash light sockets... If your controls still work though I'd say its just the lights or a single wire that you have issues with! I'm going to be in my dash this week doing some stereo work so I'll keep an eye out for you.

 

What happened was that I blew 3 fuses and popped 4 bulbs....not sure where the surge came from, but I had been briving through an electrical storm that morning....maybe the small amount of rubber on the tires wasn't enough to insulate...weird though.....I fixed everything and it's back to normal.

 

Current = Tension / Resistance.

You need to measure the Voltage in your dash (prolly around 10V), then calculate the resistance to drop tension to max 4.5Volts (most LEDs have 4.5 Volts max input).

And the best is to use 1/2Watts resistances, they run cooler than 1/4Watts.

And for really newbies to LED world, a LED is in fact a diode, (Light emitting diode) so it can only be connected one way, it blocks current on the other way.

Etienne