Driving home in the rain and noticed loss of head lamps illumination. Pull in the driveway, daughter exits car and say's dad there's a fire. Rear passenger runner lamp shorted out and caught fire and set the bumper on fire and flames were present. Ran to the kitchen, grabbed extinguisher, ran back and the fire was exterminated. OK, need a lamp, bumper cover, hole the size of an apple. Now, why headlamp issues? Apparently I lost front right low beam bulb, I know this because the removed ands tested the bulb. I also lost the left side high beam bulb, which I tested. In addition, I lost fog lamps and verified the fuse is actually fine. In addition, I found the blown runner/parking lights/license plate fuse, which was blown, replaced it with the spare and found the front parking lights only don't work, the back do. Hmmmm, I plan to replace the front low/high beam bulbs today.

Hard to believe that the runner light incident caused multiple bulbs to fail as there are 6 fuses for all the different zones. I removed the faulty runner lamp and had to clip the wires as the plug was melted together. Upon removal, the lamp was full of water of course.

Any bulb replacement will be one at a time as to not pop all at once. I'm looking at $50.00 worth of bulb replacement from this incident let alone the $200.00 bumper cover.

Only one of my running lights is working and I plan to disconnect all the others as their useless anyway and can obviously cause shorting in the electrical system. My biggest concern is that there have been recent threads regarding the running lights.

 

Wow, I'm sorry to hear about the fire.

I would have thought that a fuse would blow before a fire would start. I'm assuming that you are not the original owner since you've been on the forum for less than a year. I'd suspect that a previous owner did something to screw up the wiring. I haven't heard of anything similar in following this forum for the past 6 years.

With all those bulbs blowing, I'd check the voltage of the 12 volt circuits. It could possibly be a voltage regulator, or connection between the alternator and battery, or grounding. All of these are just guesses.

 

Bob220, thanks for your comments. I don't forsee a voltage problem as the rest of the vehicle was fine this morning when driving to work. I'll poke around anyhow with my meter.

I just purchased a used bumper cover off E-bay for $88.00 and am purchasing headlamp bulbs for 15.00 at lunch.

 

A few more thoughts on the subject:

One possibility is low electrolyte level in the battery. And one possible cause of this is a faulty voltage regulator causing the water in the battery to eventually boil off. When this happens, the battery would be unable to moderate the voltage and light bulbs would burn out from the higher voltage. So, check the "water" level in the battery.

One possibility for the fire is a higher voltage spike caused the glass envelope of the light bulb to shatter. Then, for whatever reason the fuse failed to perform, the exposed filament could have started the fire.

 

Thanks Bob220, the flames definitely started in the light assembly as the unit was very burnt inside and connectors melted together. I had to endure replacing the parking light bulbs as one must remove the plastic shroud above the tires. I propose that anyone who plans to replace the parking lamps replace the runners at the same time as their both accessible.

I plan to check the battery this evening. A lesson to be learned here is that if one looses the tail lights/license and runners and the fuse is blown, investigate the runner light's as shorted by water and the cause. Any one of these four runners, if causing the short, is probably full with water and causing the blown fuse issue.