TO ANYONE WHO HAS PROBLEMS WITH THEIR DOME LIGHT... DO THIS:

Take a philips driver, and pop open the sunglass holder. Remove the two brass screws. Now take a very thin flat head driver, and pop out the clear lenses. Carefully remove the two screws making sure not to touch the metal posts of the light bulbs AND the screws together, since that will ground a 12v piece of metal= spark.

Get the 4 screws removed, and drop the dome light unit. Unplug both plugs so that you have the thing in your lap to work on. Flip it over, and look at the tiny philips head screws that hold everything in place. With your philips driver, make sure everything is VERY tight. Some of your cars are 10 years old guys, and things get loose over time. No fuse or anything is going to help, if the connection of metal on metal isn't present. So after you make sure all the little screws are super tight. Plug the unit back in, but dont mount it. Just check to see that the bulbs come on. Also, have two extra bulbs ready to go. Just buy a new pack, they're a few bucks, and it doesn't hurt to have spares. If you STILL dont get light, try the new bulbs. If THOSE dont work, you have a fuse bad, and need to check the voltage of the wires with a volt meter before you take any more steps to find the issue or fuse that's bad.

This is a very short process guys, and having no lights at night time sucks donkey balls, so just take the 20 minutes or so and do the work when you have the time. If you do everything I said, I garuntee you'll have your lights fixed in that 20 minutes.

 

sounds nice, but i keep blowing fuses and i dont know how to find where it is grounding out and blowing a fuse

 

I blew a fuse once also. Just take the unit apart and check every wire around it. One of my wires got pinched straight from the factory, so it eventually wore through the sheilding to metal and grounded out. When you're checking the wires, make sure there's no indentations anywhere from it getting pinched.

 

my passenger side dome light is out, but i'm goning to try what blacktibs said first before i try and replace the whole unit. it's strange because it works when it wants too.

 

Well, you can see the fuse 6 and it leads to certain things. We can tell the radio wouldn't be the problem. So, we have the overhead console and associated wiring, the clock, the trunk lights and the door lights. It's alot of wiring to check, yes, but you'll never know what your problem is without checking the wiring and components. Really, when you're blowing a fuse, it's usually something you did. Noone else can troubleshoot it like you can. Sorry for the vaugeness, but it's as close to troubleshooting the problem as I can come without actually being there.

The reason I post the schematics is because it saves others from having to do the same thing. When you come into a thread and see the schematics it knocks alot of time off the troubleshooting. It took me 5 minutes to pull those pics up. Those schematics contains everything you will need to check to troubleshoot the problem.

You'll notice blacktibs came in after and mentioned the overhead. He didn't have to go to a shop manual or anything. The schematics were on the page. He remembered that when he had that problem, it was in the overhead.

When it comes to electronics troubleshooting, alot of the times there is no magic bean that will fix it. You'll just need to check things.
My favorite troubleshooting technique is visual inspection, where you look for something that's out of the ordinary.
My next favorite is precussive maintenance, that's where you tap things until you figure out what is causing the fault.
I hate having to break out the multimeter and do actual techincal things with cars. Finding a short to ground is very difficult with a multimeter anyways.

So yeah, do a visual inspection of everything, plug in a fuse and start precussive maintenance until the fuse blows.

 

now that was amazing dtn lol that really helps, thanks

 

well in all reality your first post DTN did help me, because the things that the schematic mentioned are the things that dont work on my car right now. So that means i blew the fuse and now i have to get one.

thanks to everyone and thanks to you DTN for the schematic fing02.gif

 

A 10amp Fuse fixed my trunk backlight, sunroof, lights, and door 'ding' sound. I'm too lazy to read of what other people put as a reply. lol


it also fixed my clock.

 

I have a little different problem: I keep on burning the driver side dim light?! WTF, the pass side works always...

 

redshark its a 15amp fuse