Happy New year everybody. Been an interesting few months, one where I seriously contemplated getting rid of the cat..! Bur I decided Ive done to much on her to let her go... so I've got a slight problem with the light in the boot, I added an LED strip a while back and changed the festoon bulb to an LED, and its worked fine until recently where its just stopped working.

Theres no power getting to the bulb after running a meter across I am getting an earth.

Ive been looking for a fuse but doesn't look like there is one in the circuit, all I can see from the diagram is the switch in the boot that seems to trigger the light and that is working fine, so could it be another broken wire somewhere?

Anybody had this problem before?

 

Hex, look for what is called a circuit tester. What this does is it puts a pulse on a wire and you can use the antenna end to follow the wire. In your case, you would attach the transmitter end to the positve terminal of the light and then use the antenna to follow the wire back. If you have a signal making it all the way back to the switch, then you know the wiring is good. Otherwise, what you are going to see is at some point, the signal is going to just fade away to nothing. In those last few inches (10 cm) is your broken/damaged wire.

The other thing that I would tell you to try is to do your switch voltage check again, but this time with the lights connected. If the output terminal of the switch sees 12 VDC, then you know that you have a bad wire between the switch and the light base. If you get a low voltage (something less than 10 VDC), then you have either a high resistance in the switch or the wiring upstream of the switch is bad.

If you need me to provide any more details, just say so. The circuit testers can be picked up for fairly cheap and a lot of them are used for testing CAT5 cables. But, they will have attachments to allow you to test normal wiring.

 

Hi Mate
I will buzz the cable through backwards from the light to the switch I think. It did stop after I had packed the boot full of boxes when I moved last month so they might have snagged a cable or something. If I get a good reading down the cable will have to assume its the switch end. The switch is new just over a year ago so cant see it being that but you never know, I might even simply just throw a push switch in there if its getting to difficult to fix. If theres no other components though should be a relatively simple fix.

Famous last words !