Folks, My 2005 Gen 2 aka Vegemite has 390k km; still running like a champ. Got the dark dash; started looking at replacing the combo meter when I found a video where by you: 1) Leave the driver's door open 2) Put the car in Aux 3) Hold the climate button for 5 seconds 4) Flick the lights on Like magic, the door ajar red light came on! Powered up, dash on! Does anyone have any idea why this works? From what I've read, it's a cap gone bad on the combo meter. Faz
When I was in college, and you were done using the computer, you had to type LOGOUT when you were done. There was this widespread story circulating that if you added more Ts on the end of LOGOUTTTT it logged you out faster. The most popular version of the story was that the more Ts on the end, the faster the logout. There was a real explanation (something faster would happen if whatever you typed matched the first four letters LOGO and whatever you typed after that wasn't exactly UT) but it was never as popular as the Ts-make-it-faster version. With the bad capacitor there, pretty much anything you do that makes some electrical glitches might give the meter another chance to start up. So you'll read all kinds of hacks that involve doing thing x or thing y that makes the meter light up again, until that stops working too, but then maybe thing z works. For a while. When you get tired of that and just want it fixed, a non-kaput capacitor works wonders.
My favorite was when you have a bad starter in a non hybrid car and you'd carry a big stick around and lean out the door and hit the starter with the stick, which would get it to start. Then eventually when that stopped working I'd just make sure I'd always park with the car facing slightly down hill so I could push start it. And eventually I'd park in a place where that didn't work and have to get some help pushing it and then and only then did I consider replacing the starter. Meanwhile my combo meter in the dash has the capacitor problem once or twice a year for four years now and it's never lasted long enough to pull it and solder on a new one.
The capacitor on the main board of my washing machine went kaput a while back. The machine could usually be made to start up and run, but then it would decide it was done partway through the cycle. That was annoying. I didn't wait very long to change that capacitor. For a replacement board they wanted something very close to what I had paid for the washer.
It's amazing how dependent we are on capacitors in all our devices and how often an entire product will get sent to the landfill simply because no one has ever figured out how to build a profitable business diagnosing and replacing capacitors in all devices... I'm sure the culture of planned obsolescence has destroyed most anyone who's tried. Sure do miss the days when every major city had an electronics store with every possible type of capacitor and other electronic stuff at a great price... First the big box electronic stores ruined those businesses and then the internet ruined the big box electronic stores. And it's so frustrating to have to wait for days for a tiny little electronic part to show up in the mail, that may or may not work, which often means having to try again and wait even longer.
I actually found a couple while I was dealing with the washing machine; Appliance Parts, Lawn Mower Parts, Electronic Parts | PartSimple https://www.upfix.com/ Both offer an array of options like "buy a reman board from us if we have it and send us your old one", or "send us yours and we send it back fixed". Just depends on how soon you want clean clothes. The second one there doesn't just do appliances; a lot of car parts too. None was as cheap as going to the local electronics shoppe and buying a capacitor ... but I was lucky that my old capacitor had been considerate enough to swell all up and look kaput, so I wasn't really wondering what the issue was.
