This may have been diaried before....too lazy to look

History - My GXP blows foglights on the drivers side like crazy. After looking at the last bulb I realized it wasn't actually blown and then looked in more detail at the set up of the housing/bulb clip. Both housings were replaced under warranty. Drivers side started blowing out again a few months later.

Apparently the light is grounded by connection to the housing. Well, if you've looked at that connection, you've seen that it is not very good. I noticed that if I whacked the underside of the fascia the light would come back on. This immediately made me think about the ground as the source of the problem. Whacking the housing must have made the clip jump and touch the housing again. So today I ran a ground wire from the clip to the frame. Light appears to be working again. Took it out for a ride to bump it around and no problems. I don't think there should be any problem grounding it to the frame.

We'll see how long this works.

Please keep us updated on this. I had a problem with my drivers side as well and once I had the housing replaced it worked just fine for a few months. Then the bulb went out a couple of weeks ago and it has been too cold to do anything about it. I guess I should try hitting the bottom and see if that works. Can you post some pics on your new ground?

Ever since I had the housing replaced I haven't had any bulbs blow (cross fingers) and it'* been quite a few months.

good luck and I hope this solves your problems!

I'll get pics up soon. I'm driving it today since the 96 has to go in for a trans leak so with all the jarring I should know whether or not the fix will work.

Interesting, keep us posted. One thing I’ve noticed is that on my blown H3s, the filament appears to be ok and connected, although the glass is discolored. That seems odd to me and I don’t know where the failure is. Seems like if the filament is still intact, the bulb should light up.

Since the foglamp subject has come up again, I will mention that a few months ago I drilled a ¼ ventilation hole on the back of one of my housings to see if cooler temps inside the housing (at the expense of moisture) would help. My tbird runs H3s on a ventilated housing, and the bulbs last forever, so I gave it a shot. No dice, it did not help and as a matter of fact the bulb life seemed a little worse than the sealed housing.

I’ve verified that the harness and feed wire are not getting hot, so I don’t think it’* a wiring problem. I guess a bad ground could overheat the bulbs as well. My guess at this point is that the small plastic housing is not capable of dissipating the heat generated by the H3 bulb.

So in hopes of eliminating this problem and getting better lighting, I just dropped $180 on this HID kit from Ebay: Normally I would not put a HID kit into a halogen housing because I refuse to blind other drivers. However this vendor has an H3 HID bulb available with the correct orientation so that it should preserve the excellent upper cutoff of these factory fogs.

The HIDs should run cooler. I hope that they will last longer, however that remains to be seen. The vendor I am purchasing from seems to have a good rep on various message boards, so I am hopeful that I will have good results. The HID bulbs are $90 a pair to replace, so I hope they will last years instead of months (or weeks) like the H3s.

It is very possible that there are multiple problems with this particular fog light configuration.

When I originally took the car in for the fog light problem under warranty, the Good witch guys said that the wiring harnesses were unable to handle the current and they were blowing the fuse (although I never changed the fuse when they would blow - it always worked). After the second trip to the dealer they then said there was a problem with the housings which, in retrospect, seems more reasonable now that I fixed the problem myself. If it keeps it up, I'm going to rip the whole damn thing out and wire as I did on my two GPs and forget about it.

But after several days of driving, I'm having no problems. I didn't replace the bulb either. I'm using the same one since it actually was working.

I promise to get pics up this weekend, but it is a REALLY simple ground. Run a wire from the brass clip that holds the bulb to a bolt on the frame; don't disconnect the original ground on the brass clip.

Hmm.

Both of my foglights were out when I got the car, so I'll definitely try what you did to fix them.