Illumination Light Fuse Keeps Blowing

JDStone

New Member
Dec 21, 2012
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Hi everyone,

About two years ago I put in an aftermarket CD player in my '01 Mustang. Never had any issues with it. About 6 to 8 months ago, when driving my battery light would come on when driving. Sometimes it may last a second or 20. Sometimes I can drive 200 miles and it comes on once or twice, other times I can go 5 miles and it's nonstop. I've had the alternator checked repeatedly and that is not the issue. I've checked all grounds, I have the CD player, amp in the trunk, and a 410W inverter in the passenger seat. All the grounds appeared fine.

I decided to to yank the CD player out, and properly attach all the wires. This time, heatshrink them, tape, the whole 9 yards. Last time I just crimped them together in a connecting device. Never had any fuses blown, or anything.

I did all that yesterday, last night I went to drive to a friends house and I had no dash lights. I assumed it was something I did earlier with the CD player. This morning, checked the fuse and it was blown. It was a really old fuse so I thought maybe it was just age. Put in a replacement mini 5A fuse and boom blown. I yanked out the CD player, throughly checked all the wires, checked the wires on the inverter, checked behind the dash (of what I could see) underneath the dash on both the driver and passenger side and I did not see any wire that looked damaged. Obviously common sense says it was something to do with rewiring the CD player, which apparently actually wiring professionally this time causes a major fuse to blow.

And I put everything back in, reattached the battery connections, crawled under, put in a 10A fuse instead, put the key in and turned to the battery and everything fine. I pulled the headlight/dash switch and boom it blew with a bright flash. So can anyone point into the direction on what I might be doing wrong? None of the wires look compromised and I can't drive at night now. Also I had three left over wires from the harness, orange and orange with a thin black stripe that I didn't use before, and a black one with a thin white stripe, that I think I didn't use before. Any suggestions?

And apologies for the long drawn out post.
 
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are you just poking the hot wires into the fuses , if so you may have poked a wire in the wrong side of the fuse , theirs two holes , you poke them in the one that the fuse makes hot not the one the car/battery/ignition makes hot , it has to have that fuse before it , also make sure that where the wires go into the fuse box that none of them are touching the fuse box , thats a big one , make sure theirs no way of the hot wire in the fuse box to get grounded , example , if you where to drill and screw a wire directly into the fuse box , like the plastic part and then ground the box , :poo: would fry !! , youll smell it , ive never heard of someone running their stereo to a 5 amp fuse , thats way to small , probably the reason it would blow at different times is cause when you turn up the stereo it needs more juice and it would exceed 5 amps , stereos have amplifiers in them , but will defiantly exceed 5 amps , if a wire is compromised and grounding out youll smell it it will make your lights fade it will make your dash lights fade , stereo will go on and off weird :poo: will happen:ferry: until of course a fuse blows , im not gonna tell you to plug it into a bigger fuse cause i dont really know for sure whats wrong and dont want to make it worse , but ve got mines poked in a 30 amp fuse and havent had any problems with it , it shouldn't :leghump: anything up just put a second fuse between the fuse box and the stereo if your not sure if itll :leghump: up
 
well i have to say you really should go back and look through the wires again and make sure you did not double cross anything or put a wire where it shouldn't be, i know i've done stuff like this before and just went back to the task i had finished before the problem and try to figure why it is cause a new problem after i thought i fixed one.

Also didn't catch it in your earlier post, do you have your amp and stereos running to your fuse box? if so you may want to look into just getting an inline fuse box, it mounts to the power wire of your amp and has a larger, more correct fuse to use for so much power being pulled.

And finnally the black wire i think is ground, and the orange ones corralate with your headlight switch, for example they are there because they are the wires that turned the backlights on in your stock stereo unit, don't really needs those wires unless your hooking up lights or something, and now that i say that it brings up the question did you cap the end of those wires because if not, and then you pull the switch for your parking lights or headlights then they will ground out and cause a fuse to blow for sure.
 
Yeah, it turns out I accidently wired a negative to a postive wire, and that's the one that killed the dash lights.

Everything is wired to seperate fuses, to the battery, etc. I just made a simple mistake and I didn't catch it.