How to splice into the ambient lighting

Hi all,

I've always thought there should be a light under the cubby..... so I decided to add one, but wanted it to come on and off with the ambient lighting. I asked around to find out where there might be a good place to tap into the ambient lighting circuit, but no one really knew. So last resort I decided to take a door panel off and splice into it at one of the lights.


To remove the door panel, I followed that part of the instructions from Teslatap's door projector article http://teslatap.com/modifications/projector-logo-lights/ I bought a $5 set of plastic door panel removers from Amazon, they were sufficient.



I unplugged all the wires so I didn't have to hold up the door panel. It is easy to find where the wires go back to as they are all a specific length. The ambient light fixture is mounted under the armrest.

The connection is in the middle part of the door. Unclip the connector and peel back some of the black cloth tape, it's super sticky.

The wires coming to the ambient light are purple and black. I've spliced in and I put some Super 33 electrical tape over it.

So here's the part I'm not happy about. I could not find a way to get my wire inside the car through the existing wire loom. It is packed in so tightly and is bound about half way into the door, I didn't want to chance trying to push something through it. So there's a somewhat inconspicuous area that, after wrapping the wire in Super 33 it's not noticeable at all. (well except to me) I ran it up to the top/front edge of the door panel across the open space and into the dash trim (it slides down).


Running the wire to the cubby area is a piece of cake, I didn't get any pictures of that. All the panels come off fairly easily along the way. My LED light is not permanently mounted yet as I'm experimenting with the angle of the light.

Otherwise it all goes back the way it came out. Plug the connectors back in. When putting the door panel back on, I think it kinda hung by the top and then the bottom parts snapped in.

All in all it worked great an the light works fine with the ambient lights... it even dims and brightens on the two ambient lighting levels.

Thanks all, hope this is helpful to someone.

-m

Hi, thanks, I hope it goes well for you.

The loom is there and visible... there are multiple purples and so many within the bundle that I couldn't see--I had no idea where to being and didn't want to cut into every purple to see if it was the right one. If you make any headway on that, please update he thread as that would be a much better way to go about it.

The other thing that was also going to be difficult was the loom feed is exposed in the middle of the door, like a foot and a half from the entrance point at the door hinge area. It wouild be difficult to try to trace a wire that you can't se for 1.5 feet.......... :/

Thanks.

-m

How did you get it through?

Check out the behavior of the light in the passenger footwell... that one is on more along the lines of the dome light and easy to get at.

-m

Hi mmh,

Yeah, it's a little scary the first time, but the if you start along the bottom (as per the Teslatap article in the original post) you can't go too wrong. The plastic pegs basically just need more force to get them started to pull out--they go straight in... I don't recall thinking they would break off. At the top of the door panel there are like hooks that you hang the door panel from the top first, and then push in the plastics pegs around the lower edges.

I used a plastic tool from Amazon that's for removing door and other panels on cars (Was like $5 or something). It helped get some leverage on the panel and made it a little more comfortable feeling when working on it.

At your own risk, of course, use a little more force

-m