Help! Electrical Problems!
 

I've owned my 318ti for a little under a year and winter was not kind to it, bodywork aside it's still in good running order except for the electrical system. I don't know a whole lot about cars in general but would like to learn more and eventually do a lot of aftermarket upgrades on it. The problems I have are the tail lights don't work, I've replaced all the bulbs and fuses and they still don't work. My dashlights also don't work and my wipers turn on and off whenever they want but are usually on, finally I just pulled the fuse on the wipers so I wouldn't burn out the motor. Also while I was replacing fuses and trying to test to see if that was working the fuse for my radio randomly blew. I have no idea what to do.

Would any of these problems have anything to do with the fact that I had an aftermarket headunit and an 1100W amp hooked up pushing 2 10" subwoofers?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Yes for thes headunit and fuse blowing. If you dont set the system up correctly, you can blow fuses for interior lighting and such. If the front and/or rear wipers are constantly going, its likely in the stalk/switch. Tails, if the 3rd doesnt work either, its your brake pedal switch. If nothing in your cluster lights up, check the plug on the rear of the cluster...yes you have to remove the cluster. If the center of the dash doesnt light, its likely just blown bulbs otherwise a fuse.

try having the car running when you try the taillights, apparently BMW made it so they don't work when the car's off, I spent a few weeks freaking out about that too until I figured it out

yeah what he said :tongue:

depending how things were hooked up its very well a possibility .. a common thing people tend to do when a fuse blows and keeps blowing is try a higher rating fuse to see if it blows .. that only makes the problem bigger .. your gonna have to test wires and see which one is the culprit ..