95 Subaru Legacy running lights

tedsubi

Please help, my running/tail lights and my dashboard lights don't work. Every other light works though(low/high beams, reverse, break). I don't know much about cars but My neighbor just put in a new relay and the running lights worked fine for about a week. Then the dashboard lights started flickering on & off for a day or two & now I don't have dashboard or running lights at all. Does anybody know what this could be please?

93tracker5spd

Hello! You don't say why you replaced the relay, but as a general rule relays don't go bad unless they are being overloaded. And if you replaced the bad relay and didn't solve the overload that caused it to go bad in the first place, then I would say the same problem which effected the first relay is starting to come back by overloading the new relay. As to what is causing the overload in the relay; I would really need the vehicle present to say for sure. But I would start by assuming there is a short in the dash/marker light circuit. Start with the fuse block, isolate that circuit, make sure the fuse is good, and not jumped, in other words wrapped with aluminium foil or some other method. Make sure all grounds are clean and tight, yes, a ground can cause such a mystery and many others, grounds are there to complete a circuit and are just as important as the feed wire. Pick up a cheap battery powered cotinuity tester and with the vehicles battery ground wire disconnected, test the feed wires in that circuit, if the light comes on from a non powered feed wire, you have found your short. This is not definitive by any stretch as electrical problems carry their own personality and I would have to be able to access the vehicle to know. But it is somewhere to start.