Burning Smell

[CTScott]

Originally Posted by Treyz

Here's a funny thing. The night that this all started on, it happened again tonight a week later. Found out that it's the fog light system fuse. For some reason it has to do with the inline fuse.

I have the DLAA aftermarket ones. I connected it exactly to the DIY that was written before the hack with v2 so that I can get the foglight indicator on the cluster to work. Anyone else with the same fogs experience this?

Now I'm gonna have to go through the connections again.

That's kind of scary - Sounds like the fuse may have a higher rating than the wire connected to it, or there may be a bad crimp of the wire to the inline fuse holder. What is the rating of the fuse, and what size is the wire ("nn AWG" typically printed on the insulation every couple of inches)?

[Treyz]

OK .. looked at the fuse holder .. yeah totally melted (anything plastic). the 15amp blade fuse that was in there is stuck to the holder.

Conclusions could either be a bad crimp as stated above or that the fuse itself got so hot, that it couldn't melt to blow (as it should) and just melted everything around it. I literally opened the thing and the plastic around the fuse was melted. Anything metal stayed in tact.

The guage wire used is 16 I believe.

Any suggestions? Should I up the amp? Lower the amp? I mean obviously I'm going to get another blade fuse holder. Or should I get a mini blade fuse?

[CTScott]

Originally Posted by Treyz

OK .. looked at the fuse holder .. yeah totally melted (anything plastic). the 15amp blade fuse that was in there is stuck to the holder.

Conclusions could either be a bad crimp as stated above or that the fuse itself got so hot, that it couldn't melt to blow (as it should) and just melted everything around it. I literally opened the thing and the plastic around the fuse was melted. Anything metal stayed in tact.

The guage wire used is 16 I believe.

Any suggestions? Should I up the amp? Lower the amp? I mean obviously I'm going to get another blade fuse holder. Or should I get a mini blade fuse?

16 AWG wire is rated for 10 Amps, so the wire is a bit thin for the fuse rating. If the lights are 50W each, then they would draw approximately 4.2 Amps each, so you could drop to a 10A fuse to match the wire gauge.

Since just the fush holder is melted, I would bet that the real issue was a bad wire crimp. If the wire was significantly undersized the wire itself would have been warm or hot to the touch as well.

[Treyz]

So I tackled replacing the fuse holder today. The holder that I used originally was from the kit itself so it was just plastic and kind of cheap looking. It was originally for a large blade fuse as well.

Now I have a more waterproof heavy duty mini blade fuse holder from Radio Shack. used a 10amp fuse. We'll see what happens from there. Also, I looked under the dash today and checked out the fuse holder. The origianl fuse is a 15amp and is actually there. Unfortunately the mini fuse is different from tha I have now. No worries. Hopefully all will be good.

Here's the damage ...





Basically the smell was being sucked in and came through the blower when is was smoking. The fuse seemed to be hot on the one side, but never blew. Weird. As you can see, everything melted that was plastic on the fuse. But the fogs still worked lol.