Alright, car has been at the dealer for the past week having an oil leak fixed. I go to pick up the car today from Montgomery Mazda, the Service Manager goes out to pull it around for me, then comes in and tells me that my battery is dead....I'm like, OK? How the hell did my battery die? My 8 is not my daily driver, and sometimes sits in the garage for a month without being started, never a dead battery.

So they go to jump the battery, and then come back in and tell me that it's a loose negative battery terminal. They replaced the terminal for me free of charge, car starts & drives fine. Now this evening I'm getting ready to go for a drive, switch on my headlights and no red illumination from anything but the power window switches.

I check the "illumination" fuse under the hood, and surely it's blown. Replace it...blows again. WTF?

I'm at a loss here...fuses don't just blow for no reason. The only thing that I can think of is that the service tech shorted something out when he was replacing that battery terminal.

Any of you guys have any insight?

Thanks,
-Mark

 

There is a possibility... but wouldn't be right if I'm correct...
The illumination fuse is after the TNS relay, so is the TAIL fuse.
The front side markers and the fog lights also come off the TAIL fuse, so if they removed the front bumper to diagnosis your oil leak, they could have shorted one of those.

Problem here... the TAIL fuse is 10A along with the ILLUMI fuse, so the TAIL fuse should have blown first.
If, for some reason it didn't (like someone stuck a 15A or 20A in its place) then I can see it blowing the next fuse... which would be the ILLUMI.
Maybe a far stretch, but everything after the ILLUMI fuse is all interior stuff that the dealer shouldn't have messed with.

If you want to rule my theory out, just pull the TAIL fuse and see if the ILLUMI fuse blows again.
That'll rule out that whole circuit and narrow it down to one of the illumination components (such as the cigarette lighter) and you'll need to eliminate those one at a time.

 

Thanks for the response, Jon....I did already do that, inadvertently however After the ILLUMI fuse blew the 1st time, I pulled the TAIL fuse to use as a spare, and thats when the fuse blew again...I did notice that the ENGINE fuse, which should have been 15A had a 25A fuse in there and was not correctly installed in the block itself...I replaced that with the appropriate amperage and it still blows...

They shouldn't have had the bumper off as the oil leak was coming from the oil pan (warped)...

However, your suggestion about the individual illumination components got me thinking, especially about the cigarette lighter...the previous owner removed the lighter, circuit and all, and covered the opening with a piece of plastic...I'm wondering if he cut the wires for the lighter and now one of them is making contact with the transmission tunnel underneath the console...I'm going to go and tear into this...

 

Sounds like a good place to start

 

Winner! I pulled open the console and low and behold, the 2 wires for the lighter compartment light were cut, bare, and touching the tunnel...fixed that with some wire nuts, put in a new fuse, and viola!

Now I'll be able to sleep tonight.

-Mark

 

You got lucky! Congrats!
That could have been a nightmare to find, but you did take the right approach in debugging it! (What was the last thing I or someone else F'd with?)
Now..............how secure are those wire nuts? I will generally snip the wires clean, and then go ahead and use some shrink tubing on the ends.
You'll be okay, I'm just saying..........