[CL9] - Flickering internal lights

[schonda]

I replaced my battery with a battery from a corrolla. Long story short my battery died cause i was consuming too much power whilst engine off (my stupidity). Anyway, i swapped batteries with my mates sportivo cause he has manual and he can jump start it. So it has been a few months since the swap and im seeing some problems:

- Speedo lights and cd player headunit turn completely off for a second and turn back on.
- Headlights dim every so often (esp when air con is on)
- lights in the cabbin are very dim, the two front lights where the sunglasses go flicker which they were extremely bright before without flickering.

Is it the battery from the sportivo does not meet the power requirements of the euro, or, is there a deeper problem? Its scary when everything except the engine just turns off when driving at night...

Just spoke to my mate - he said it wouldn't be a batter problem, lose connection more likely...???

[aaronng]

The Sportivo's battery was probably also on the way out if that was the original battery that he got with the car. Go buy a new one. A Supercharge Gold MF55B24LS will fit your CL9.

[schonda]

His battery was completely new though, it wouldn't be some electrical problem?

[schonda]

Just an update:

Well guess what, when swapping the battery we accidently flipped positive/negative wrong way around and a big bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz noise and the orange lights went on....so either we have blown up the whole computer system OR just the fuse, fingers crossed its just the fuse!!!!!!

[HunterZero]

Just an update:

Well guess what, when swapping the battery we accidently flipped positive/negative wrong way around and a big bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz noise and the orange lights went on....so either we have blown up the whole computer system OR just the fuse, fingers crossed its just the fuse!!!!!!

Oooh, that sounds expensive....

Although you'd expect Honda to idiot proof these systems so just a fuse blows or breaker trips if you do that.

- HZ

[aaronng]

Oooh, that sounds expensive....

Although you'd expect Honda to idiot proof these systems so just a fuse blows or breaker trips if you do that.

- HZ
You can't make everything idiot proof. What happened is that he has put positive voltage through the whole chassis, which means every ground point for every electronic component in the car just got a serving of straight 12V..... Looks like this will be expensive since ground wires don't usually have fuses before the component.

[HunterZero]

You can't make everything idiot proof. What happened is that he has put positive voltage through the whole chassis, which means every ground point for every electronic component in the car just got a serving of straight 12V..... Looks like this will be expensive since ground wires don't usually have fuses before the component.

Of course you can't make everything idiot proof. But hooking up a battery backwards is a pretty obvious mistake to make.

I would hope that a manufacturer of a newer car with complex and expensive electronics would design it so that as many components as possible would be protected from damage or able to withstand reverse polarity for a short time in such an event and minimise the damage.

But in this case it does sound like something has been damaged. I am sure a Honda dealer would know exactly what to look at, especially since you can tell them you reversed the polarity. For your wallet's sake, hopefully it's a cheap sacrificial component that's been damaged.

- HZ

[schonda]

Idiot proof, well Honda are pretty good at that since my mates step dad who is a mechanic came to have a quick look, and he couldn't test all the fuses using this device that lights up red saying Honda protect most of the fuses to stop people playing with it with other electrical devices. Then we had to put the car to Neutral to reverse push it out of the driveway but yeh another safety feature had to unlock the transmission by sticking a screw driver in this little socket.

Secondly the battery we had my old century one had a red sticker on one side, so without much thought we were talking about our week and brainlessly attaching it, my mate said it was a bit tight on one side (the blue side) but we squeezed it in. After we found out we got the battery the wrong way around we took a closer look at the sticker, it was a PRICE TAG FFS! RIGHT NEXT TO A TERMINAL THERES A RED PRICE TAG!! Later on we found out that the reason it was tight fit was because the blue side is thinner than the red side haha so thats why it was hard to fit in.

Anyway. My mate built a fuse 100Amps or something as a replacement till monday which honda said they need to ship the original one from japan since you can't use any other aftermarket fuse...another annoyance (2 weeks waiting)....nothing special about a fuse except the honda ones just have to be shaped differently.

So after all this my mates custom made fuse works and my car's electronics works, checked everything! Also, we called up atarman honda and they happen to have one of the fusion fuses or whatever you call them....ready to pick up on monday.

In the meantime as a safety measure i wont use the air con or stereo i.e. minimal electronics as possible.

By the way: the flickering of the internal lights on the speedo, door lights, stereo turning off along with the speedo lights is all because one of the battery terminals was not on tight enough originally so glad that's all soughted - im suprised that didn't blow a fuse from the beginning but hey its all solved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And the best thing out of this self imposed situation was that i did not have to take it to a honda dealer! So glad about that.

[schonda]

One funny thing i found annoying with the euro was that there was no way of locking all doors of the car so i had to leave it there unlocked, only the drivers side had a manual key lock.