Spotlight Mystery! (...any auto elec experts?)

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Stocky

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G'day guys (and gals),

I've bought a set of Bushranger Nighthawk halogen spotlights with bundled HID conversion kit. The set also included a Bushranger wiring loom. I'm putting it into a 2013 D40 Navara.

My father and I have both installed spotlights before and reckoned we'd give these a go over this long weekend. Truth be told, I was hoping to have them in by tonight for a bit of a fox shoot. Sadly, things haven't gone to plan and despite a trouble-free install, we've spent the entire day trying to troubleshoot the damned things.... After going over and over everything trying to work out a solution, I'm desperate for a bit of friendly advice! Below is the condensed story:

One of the first things I did before the install was check the forum for info on the high beam pickup for the trigger. I followed advice to tap into the blue wire coming out of the driver's side high beam light.

I took power for the lights directly from the battery + terminal. There were two earths, which I have fitted and checked as being well-grounded. The conversion of the lights from halogen to HID was a pretty simple plug-and-play with a few minor modifications to the spotlight housing for correct fit. Connection and installation of the HID ballast was also fairly straightforward.

The supplied switch for on/off control within the cabin was one of those "mouse" clicker types which you stick up near the steering wheel. I have a switch (the ones ARB use) which I installed down next to the row of OEM switches (VDC Off, Lock/Unlock, etc) in the centre console, so I simply cut off the supplied mouse switch and wired in the other one. No big deal.

Once everything was all double-checked and all the wiring tidied up and out of the way, I decided to give the new spotties a go. Well...........that's when the problems started!!!

When I flicked the high beams on and then turned on the switch for the spotties, there was a little "pop" under the dash and no dice with the spotties. OK, I thought, it sounds like a fuse. The supplied wiring loom has two fuses: one 2amp fuse on the switching/trigger circuit mounted in the cabin, and one 15amp on the main circuit mounted in the engine bay. When I pulled out the little 2amp one, sure enough: it was blown.

After some discussion, further checks and double checks, we figured that the problem was maybe that this "blue wire" referred to in the forum is actually the power wire (higher amp) and not a high-beam logic/trigger/switching wire (lower amp) and that the little 2amp fuse was blowing due to the higher current. We couldn't find any information on here or any other forums which indicated where we could find the actual low-amp switching/trigger wire for the high beams, so we replaced the 2amp fuse with a 7.5amp fuse to handle the higher current. This then also blew, and still no dice with the spotties.

We have been going back and forth with ideas all afternoon, to no avail. I have absolutely no idea what the problem could be, and I figured you guys would be the best to ask first-up! I have been online and had a look at a few other wiring looks available on the market (Narva etc) and they all seem only to have a 15 or 30 amp fuse on the main circuit and do not include a low-amp fuse such as a 2amp on the trigger/switching circuit. If other Navara D40 owners were tapping into the blue high-beam wire and using eg a 30amp fused Narva wiring loom, they might not be having our problem. However, changing the 2amp fuse for a 10amp stopped the fuse from blowing, BUT the spotlights still didn't work AND then the driver's side high beam light blew!!!

At my wits' end...........! Any ideas from auto sparkies/experienced members out there?


Cheers,


Stocky.
 
At a glance it sounds like your powering the lights through the high beam cct. Hence why youblew a 7.5A then the cars 10A fuse. Hard to say without seeing it though.

this is why I do the wiring myself
 
The blue wire is the right one to use, on the driver's side, but NOT as a power source. It purely feeds the relay's pin 85 (which is the activation positive pole). Your switch inside should be earthed on one pole, and the other pole runs out to the relay onto pin 86.

With that setup, when high beam is active, all that's going to happen is the relay will turn on when the switch is turned on.

Then, you connect pin 30 of the relay to the battery positive with a nice fuse that will handle the draw of the ballast (forget the globes, look at the ballast). Connect pin 87 to the positive input to the ballast.

Now what you have is a set of driving lights that will only be able to come on with the high beam, and you can switch them off with the switch (but not turn them on independently of the high beam, which is the legal way to do it).

What caused your fuse to blow? My guess is a difference in the way they want the wiring loom to operate, perhaps they were assuming a negative switched headlight, which means you're dead-shorting the high beam through the switch and by installing a large enough fuse inside, you turned the 55W halogen globe itself into a fuse.
 
I'd agree with the above. Sounds like the way its currently wired it is going straight to earth through the switch, hence blowing fuses and then globe.... Personally I wouldn't bother with the fuse on the trigger wire, but the wiring will need looking at.

Just double check the relay goes pin 85 ground, pin 86 trigger input from high beam wire through switch, pin 87 output to spotlights, pin 30 12v input fused from battery. If the switch has input for park lights so it lights up with the dash lights at night this will have its own 12v and neg just for it. That is about as simple as it gets.
 
Thanks for the replies Tony & bods, appreciate your thoughts! I've read a lot of your posts, and you guys sure know your stuff. Thanks for sharing with Johnny-come-lately.

I've been back and checked through all of my wiring. For the record, I definitely didn't try to power the lights through the high beam wire; I used the loom supplied so it was a simple hook-up to the battery pos terminal.

The first thing I did was improve the earth- I'd had it earthed to the body through an existing bolt, but it looked like the thread was painted. I've since extended the two earthing cables through to the earth on the plate behind/under the battery where the neg terminal connects.

I've also gone through and checked the polarity of the connections between the spotties and ballast/amp, and all looked OK. Similarly, the wiring in the cabin also checked out.

I tried powering it up again with the same results as before, unfortunately.... As the switching fuse was what kept blowing, I reckoned that it was coming down to the fact that I'd cut off the supplied stick-on mouse-style switch and extended the wires to run up to an arb-style illuminated 3-pin rocker switch mounted behind the gear stick. I assumed the red, white and black wires were main pos, LED earth and main neg earth, respectively. Maybe this was wrong...hmmmm

Anyway, the connections I'd made between the lengths of cable were OK, but it seems that I mixed up the connections on the rocker switch, as changing these around seems to have solved the problem. I took it back to ARB (where I bought the lights), and they sorted this out in a few minutes. I had tested the switch myself earlier and thought I had it right, but obviously I didn't!! It didn't help that no wiring diagram came with the switch. There was provision for 6 pins, but there were three fitted to the switch and were numbered 1, 2 and 4. Pins 1 and 4 were next to each other on one end of the switch (pin 4 was gold/brass colour) and pin 2 was located by itself on the long edge of the switch. I assumed pin 2 was pos, and pins 1 and 4 were neg earth and LED, respectively. This was obviously the problem.


Stocky
 
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I had a similar harness supplied with my LED light bar. Red is positive, black is negative, and white was the output to the relay (positive). If you earth the white wire, when the switch is turned on you're directly connecting the positive feed (red) to earth.

Glad to hear you've solved it!
 

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