# Tail light fuse keeps blowing



## edortir6 (May 26, 2006)

Hi, I have A 99 Sentra GXE. The other night I got into the car and no dash lights.....again. The first time this happened, I googled it and came across a post that said the dimmer switch was the problem so I bypassed it. Turned out to be the tail light bulbs. I changed the bulbs and everything was all good. This was around a year ago. This time the bulbs are good, the switch is bypassed (shorted the red/yellow wire and the black wire), but the fuse keeps blowing. I also cut the red/green wire, so the dimmer switch has no wires connected to it. The car was never in an accident so I can't imagine there would be a pinch somewhere in the wiring. I'm not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Ed


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## BadcarEurope (Oct 30, 2015)

Check all rubber seals... maybe it got some moisture from air?


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## derekbrian (Oct 2, 2015)

Fuse is a circuit protection feature ,if it continually blows you have a circuit overload. This can be in the form of crossed or unwanted ground circuits. If the power to the interior or tailights is interrupted by a bare wire to ground or the lamp assemblies have defects causing a short to ground, this would cause the repeated blown fuses. Visit auto electrician to solve the problem.


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## OhmsLaw (Mar 29, 2016)

What's the marked amp rating on the fuse?


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## edortir6 (May 26, 2006)

Can't recall what the problem was lol, I'm pretty sure it was a ground wire behind the radio.


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## OhmsLaw (Mar 29, 2016)

I have a fuse saver idea for problems like this. It'd be a power resistor substituted for the fuse that passes just enough current to allow the short to be traced, but not enough current to smoke anything.

For a 40A fuse I might want to pass 20A or so.

On paper it works fine but I haven't needed to make one yet for our own vehicles. Maybe some company already makes a gadget for this type of problem.

Another way to do it with the minimum number of blown fuses is to disconnect half of the stuff powered and try another fuse. If it doesn't blow, you know which half the problem is in.
You keep on halving the powered components till you're down to one.
More than one overload can get tricky.

This is the binary chop/search routine but Wikipedia calls it other names.


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