Dash LEDs Wiring Expert Needed

[Vipermann]

So my car is all buttoned back up and looks great. Driving for the first time and all new dash LEDs look and work great.

Give car a wash, and then drive it again - top Speedo LED is then dark and top Oil Pressure LED is dark. WTF?

Then I dry the car off, and this morning, all the LEDs work again...

Question: how/why is it possible that water or something affected those LEDs? where should I look for leaks? other thoughts?

[01sapphirebob]

Probably not a water issue but the LED’s themselves. I did this upgrade year before last over the winter and had everything put back together. Everything worked fine but over the course of the winter I had two of the bulbs go out on me. So I had to rip the dash apart and do it all over again. Sucks but it may just be the case. If you got them fron Superbright they seem to have a pretty good warranty. I had to warranty all the bulbs I had because they no longer carried the color I needed.

[Steve M]

Likely a loose connection in the LED itself...I've had one in my 4-gauge cluster on the side go out in the 3+ years I've had mine installed. Still haven't gotten around to replacing it, but thankfully those are fairly easy to remove/replace.

[Rocket]

I'm less impressed by the quality of the Superbright led's lately. Just had another led go bad - and had to go thru their bs replacement policy.

[Steve M]

I realize I'm digging an old thread back up, but I wanted to rescind this statement:

Likely a loose connection in the LED itself...I've had one in my 4-gauge cluster on the side go out in the 3+ years I've had mine installed. Still haven't gotten around to replacing it, but thankfully those are fairly easy to remove/replace.

Getting to that 4-gauge cluster is a royal PITA - for some reason, I thought you could get to the screws without having to remove the entire dash. I was wrong.

Here's where it got interesting though - I went to replace the burned out bulb with a new unit from SuperBrightLEDs.com, which was the same place from which the other bulbs were sourced. I installed it, and went to test it, and it started doing some weird things. For some reason, when I went to turn on the parking lights to test the gauge bulbs, none of them worked. Worse yet, the interior lights and gauge cluster would all go dead, only to come back on after a couple of seconds and then cut back off. The battery in my car was about 7 years old, so I figured it must be giving up the ghost even though the car spends 99.9% of it's life on a Battery Tender. I measured the voltage, and it was solid at around 12.8 volts disconnected from the Battery Tender. I figured it was still the most likely culprit, so I researched battery options to replace my DieHard Platinum, which is no longer made.

$200 later and a new battery installed, and it was still doing it. I was beyond pissed, and started looking elsewhere - fuses, relays, you name it. Finally, in my frustration, I reinstalled the old LEDs, and the problem immediately went away (albeit with one still not working). I learned a couple very important lessons:

1. Trust your tools - my multimeter indicated that my battery was still fine voltage-wise, but I refused to believe it
2. Think twice before sourcing your LEDs for this particular project from SuperBrightLEDs. I'm firmly in Rocket's camp now, and will look elsewhere in the future for LEDs.

I still can't for the life of me understand why or how an LED in the 4-gauge cluster could cause this many problems. The car was exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of a failed battery, all because of a stupid f-ing LED.

My dash is still torn apart waiting on a different LED solution to arrive. I guess worst case, I'll reinstall the good old fashioned incandescent bulbs and try this again sometime when I have the time to figure out what the hell is going on here.

Consider yourselves warned.

[braunstein82]

Exact same thing happened to me. One of the plugs behind the main cluster was loose. Causing the vertical one to go out.