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Issues with dash lights, air conditioner and radio.
Dash lights get brighter or turn off and on perioticaly.
Factory radio and cd player gets all staticie when it rains and both play and sound normal when it is sunny.
My ac; below 70 degrees ambient is the only time the compresser turns on. full of refrigerant, all relays and sweitches are good. The brain thinks it dosen't have a turn on signal , as if the switch is off.
I was wondering if there is a common wire to all these components that could be loose or corroded?
I also had a trail hitch put on along with a U-Haul wiring harness, put in by a U-Haul shop.
I disconnected it from the power source.
No Joy.
Any help out there?
The sun load sensor circuit reports to the body computer and HVAC systems (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) how bright the sunlight is and of course whether it is day or nighttime. While it's need to inform the system when to turn the headlights on and off is easy to understand, it also is an input for the dash lights as well as the AC system. This is far from the only input in these systems but it is common to all of them. You'll need a technician who has a scan tool (preferably the O.E. Ford IDS or an Autel Maxi-Sys) that can communicate with all of them to see just what the modules are getting from their various inputs and how effectively they are sharing that data.
When you put the gearstick in PARK, the little digital display on the cluster has a rectangle that's meant to move over the "P" to indicate PARK has been selected, so you can then remove the key and exit the car. But in mine, as it's an old car with 200,000 miles on it, the little rectangle often doesn't stay over the "P" anymore and instead with the weight of the worn gearstick, drops down somewhere between "P" and "R" and disappears from the display. When this occurs, the car computer fires up systems because it's being told the car's still active. So overnight, the battery gets drained. Just because of this stupid little rectangle on the dash not staying locked on the "P" symbol. Was a nightmare to eventually track it down, but without the worn gearstick staying in "P", it instantly becomes a clear cut battery drain and drains my new battery over a day or two. The solution is to pull the top plastic cowell off the steering column, and access the tiny flimsy switch at the base of the gear stick itself, and find a way to fix or replace it (not something I managed to ever figure out - complex and hard to access) which is meant to tell the display the car's gear selection ACCURATELY, and replace it. But if you go to Ford, they'll just rip the whole steering column out and replace that at huge cost for one tiny switch, which I can't justify on an old pig like mine, so I just make certain the gear stick ALWAYS shows the digital rectangle over the "P" before I am happy to leave the car for the night, so there's no battery drain. One solution that did work for me was to gum it up with even more very thick grease than was currently there, and it made it stick better for a time.
I hope this helps someone.
Battery was replaced in November (so almost 10 months). I loosened/re-tightened terminals and both ends of cables just to be sure it wasn't a loose ground, no change. No Codes, no Check Engine Light.
Any thoughts appreciated
Critical Thinking Skills. The next step is to take the codes (if any) and see how they relate to known system behaviors as well as the behaviors that have been observed. Your description of the problem based on a given rpm range is part of the direct observation portion, learning (knowing) things like that if the system voltage goes too high or too low can cause different modules to shut themselves down is the other. One of the things that needs to be discovered is how well does the instrument cluster communicate information to other modules and the scan tool both under normal conditions and when the trouble occurs.
So this sets the stage to gather the first round of information. Tell us what we would have found and know at this time and I'll help you figure out what you need to do next.