WARNING!! Don't blow your cigarette lighter socket! Options

[pflau]

Hi. Just a friendly warning to all that plugging a high drain appliance such as a power inverter into the cigarette lighter socket might render it inoperable!!!

OK, before somebody tells me that there is a fuse to protect the circuit and all that let me present my findings:

1. The fuse that protects the lighter socket is the same one that protects the radio. The radio works, the socket does not. So the fuse is not enough to protect the socket.

2. I use a meter to check the voltage of the cable plugged into the socket and there is 12 volts on the wire. So there is power, but none comes out of the socket.

3. Now check this picture out, there is clearly an element between the center contact and the post on the left that takes the +12 volt. I measured the conductivity of this element and there is none. Now this element is hidden under the rubber sleeve and I do not know what it is (but I do suspect it is a diode that protect the battery by preventing current flow to the opposite direction) but it is clearly blown!




Anyway, I'm going to take this to the Toyota dealer and see what they have to say!!

[pflau]

OK, ppl, I finally got it all sorted out!!!

First off, I did what I said I was gonna do which is to go to the dealer and get a new part. I was told I had to get the whole cigarette lighter assembly so I did. Thanks to this thread

http://www.6gc.net/forums/index.php?showto...mp;#entry502818

I was able to remove the old lighter socket. Now here are the old socket and the new socket side by side, with the old one on the left:



As you can see something's definitely wrong with the old one - the wire seems "exploded". I tried to remove the wire by pulling on the bulb with a pair of pliers but one end just broke right off. It felt like the only thing holding was the rubber sleeve. After I removed the sleeve form the middle here is what I found:



The wire was just detached. Now there was no fuse, no diode, no anything, just an ordinary piece of wire.. I took a ohm reading with a multimeter and it conducted.. wtf???

Now because of the ease with which I broke the wire and how the wire seemed to give under the pliers I suspected that it is actually a piece of solder wire. Now the thing about solder is that it is metal but melts in relatively low temperature. To prove my suspicion I put a soldering gun to the wire and the voila the tip just melted!! Here you can see a small piece of the tip of the wire has gone to the soldering gun.



So here is the answer. As to exactly what I hooked up to the lighter socket to run enough current to melt the wire.. I connected a laptop to a power inverter to the lighter socket. The laptop was on and the battery was drained. The total power drain to power the laptop and to charge the battery was about 80 watts.

Well I guess it's time to go to Radio Shack and see what they have so next time it happens I don't have to replace the whole darn socket!!!