Spent 3 hours debugging a loose connection in my car stereo only to find out it was a bad ground wire the whole time

That ground wire tested fine with a multimeter but was actually corroded inside the insulation, wasted my whole Saturday afternoon. Has anyone else had a phantom electrical problem that took way longer than it should have to track down?

3 comments

3 Comments

gavinw452mo ago

Man I feel your pain so hard. Spent four hours once trying to figure out why my truck's turn signal was flashing double speed on only one side. Changed the bulb, cleaned the socket, swapped the flasher relay. Even stuck a test light in there like I was some kind of electrical genius. Turned out a mouse had chewed through the wire harness behind the bumper, but it was still making contact until you hit a bump and then it'd lose connection. Pulled my hair out for two days over a dead mouse's mischief. Ground wires are the absolute worst though, they always lie to you when you think you've got it figured out.

wyatt_green312mo ago

Mouse nests are warm but the wire chewing ain't worth the trouble.

murphy.blair1mo ago

Yeah @wyatt_green31 you nailed it with the wire chewing. That's the part nobody warns you about. I had a similar thing happen with my boat trailer lights, spent all afternoon running new wire only to find out the mouse had gotten into the harness inside the frame rail. Had to pull the whole thing apart and solder in a patch. What finally worked for me was stuffing steel wool into every little gap under the hood and around the firewall. They hate that stuff and it keeps them from getting cozy in the first place.