For the last year or so I have had a persistent battery drain. If you left the battery connected, a day later it would be dead. I already had a custom dual battery setup on the van. So disconnecting the battery is as simple as popping the hood and flipping the main battery switch to off. If I forget before parking the van, then I just flipped the switch from the dead battery to the good one. I never needed a jump and the alternator charged up the dead battery. I don't drive the van much so It was easy enough to keep this routine up for a year.
I finally took the time to find the cause of the battery drain. The problem was the after market head unit. Even with the van off and idle for 30 minutes, the head unit was still pulling 10 watts of power. This is a new problem. That head unit worked great for years prior to this. I don't know why it started drawing this kind of power all of a sudden. But I don't care. It was an Android 4 head unit. Android 4. We are up to Android 14 today. I got my money's worth out of it but it was time for an upgrade even without this battery drain.
We had a pretty serious water leak at the top of the windshield where the seal failed. I fixed it, but not before we had several rain storms that got water in the van by the rear view mirror and below.
A while back I found that the fuse for the interior lights had blown. I put in a new fuse. The lights came on dim for 10 seconds, then the fuse blew again. I tried one more time, but this time with all the lights off before putting in the fuse. The lights came on all on their own, then blew the fuse. Likely there was a short somewhere, perhaps due to water. I removed the fuse and ignored the problem for a year or so.
I finally got back around to troubleshooting it. Ultimately I replaced the fuse and the lights worked fine. The fuse didn't blow, the lights could be correctly controlled. Everything just worked. Of course I didn't know that was going to be outcome before I removed all the lights to start tracing wires. I should have tested them first.
At least while I had the lights out I was able to determine the lights are fed by two different circuits. One circuit turns on the lights when a door opens. A second circuit turns on the lights when the user tilts the light reflector forward or back. See the pictures below. I always knew the lights could be tilted forward, back, or made flat. I never realized that only in the flat position would the light come on with the door.
Frankly this is a stupid design. It is not intuitive at all. I would be better to have a simple 3 pole switch on the lights. Oh well. The lights are all working again which is great at night.
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