I was adding two LED light pods to my brake lights. After wiring in the new lights my brake light works great but now the tail light stopped working. Just tapped into the ground wire and the white wire with black stripe for the brake light left the others as they were. I was wondering if it might be just the tail light bulb or if I should be checking something else. Will be picking up a new bulb this evening but wanted to ask and hear other opinions.
How did you hook the LEDs up? Parallel or series, or both? Are the LED's in the brakelight running circuit? Or just in the stop circuit? Is the brakelight running filament glowing at all or is it completely off? Are the LEDs running and brake lights? Or just brakelights?
The LEDs are just in the stop circuit and are just for brake lights. When I hit the front or rear break the brake light and the LEDs come on, just no tail light/running light when the brakes are off. They are wire in parallel.
Sounds like they are wired right. Have you disconnect the LED light to see if the running lights come on?
Right now I am thinking the light filament for the running lights is blown. The easiest and fastest way to see if this is the case would be to replace the running light bulb with a new one. A couple of bucks at any auto parts store.
If the new bulb doesn't work and you used a displacement connector or a t-tap connector to splice into the wire it could have cut the ground wire into inside the jacket but still be making contact to the brake circuit .
Replace the bulb on Thursday night and that fixed the problem. Even though the old bulb looked to be o.k. I learned that you can't just look at them always and tell if they are bad. Got everything tightened down and back in place on Friday and went for a ride Saturday. Went from Gurley to Cahaba Shrine (Widows Sons Meeting), to Parkway Place Mall (to return some shoes), to Lowe's in Hampton Cove (for concrete screws), and back to the house. It only took 12 hours to ride between those places, and Cahaba Shrine was the longest stop (right at an hour).
thanks for all the suggestions.