So I installed an hidextra kit into my daughter's 2002 TL and it went OK thanks to help from a few people here. It worked OK briefly and then the right one stopped working.

I did some trouble-shooting and it seemed that the ballast had failed as I had 12 V to the connector and swapping bulbs or igniters didn't do any good. Contacted hidextra and they shipped out a new ballast promptly, great service from them. However that was not the problem as the newly rebuilt light didn't work either.

Finally had the bright idea to connect the right light to the left connector and it worked fine. Both lights work off the left connector, neither on the right. I even rewired it, swapping the spliced-in HID connectors, same result.

As I said before, 12 V is measured at the connector. Resistance to ground on the black wire is about 1 K on both sides.

Any ideas what to look for here?

 

Try to bypass the original connector all together... Do a Relay installation and get power from the Battery itself.. The way OEM Ballast and Aftermarket ballast pull power is way different.

Doing a Relay harness should be fairly easy if you know basic Electronics, This way you will never experience shortouts again.

 

If you've got 1k resistance to ground, I'd start there. You should have maybe .1 or .2 ohms.

 

IIRC, hid extra connectors have to be swapped. As in, the red and black need to be switched on the HIDextra connector, the one that connects to the OEM harness. Look at the wires and see if black goes to black. black HIDwire->black OEMwire

The instructions should tell you something like that.

 

The relay did the trick, thanks Skirmich. They had a $20 kit at Canadian Tire that had everything I needed.

TlerTrash I think there are other ground issues with this car as there is some funky stuff going on with the wipers and whatnot. But at least now the HidExtra stuff is good as it is as direct as possible, grounded on the same frame point that the battery is connected to.

HairyMonkey019 as far as I know black is ground on the HidExtra kit. Things are working fine now.