Connect interior lights to the house battery

Even if you don’t have additional interior lights installed, just connecting the existing lights in the cargo and driver area might be a life saver. Imagine you’re about to start a road trip and realize that you just drained your starter battery because you forgot to switch off the lights a few days before. A really easy fix for that is to connect all interior lights to the house battery.

A quick view into the wiring diagram shows that all interior lights get their 12V power through one single wire, the 16 gauge red and yellow labeled cable on the left hand side below.

I’m not an expert on wiring diagrams but after a bit of browsing through the pages that describe the location of the connectors (C215) I was able to locate the wire and could follow it to a location where it was easy for me to make the cut and connect  the interior lights to the wire I had run from the house batteries in the back: The driver side A-pillar. The cable runs together with some others right behind the plastic cover.

I already had the house battery cable coming from the back on the passenger side for the radio so the only real challenge here was to route the cable through the dashboard.

Also, make it easy for the next owner and put some labels on the new connectors so that they have a chance to figure out what you’ve done. Once you attach the cover on the A-pillar you’re done with this job.

Tools needed:

• Pliers for cutting and attaching the connectors

Parts needed:

• cable (at least 16 awg)
• connectors