Headlight harness is smokin' relays

[chewie14]

So I have a 91 and a 94 XJ in which I installed Hella H4 housings and Sylvania Ultrastar bulbs with the headlight upgrade harness from K Suspension on both vehicles. Works flawlessly!

I also have a 96 XJ where sometimes the headlights will shut off and I hear a click behind the gauge cluster and then they come right back on after about a second or two. I figured the lights were overloading a breaker or something up under the dash. So, I installed the same setup on my 96 XJ, the new harness and H4 lights, and It does nothing but smoke relays. It seems when I switch to high beams, that's when it starts letting the smoke out of the relays. Does the high/low beam switch work differently on the 96 versus the 91 and 94? It all works just fine and great between high and low without the upgraded harness, but headlights shut off after a while, which is why I want the new harness to take the heavy load off the system, but when I add in that new harness, it just goes through relays instantly like candy. Something somewhere is creating an instant dead short and I can't quite figure it out. But, no fuses are blown! Just cooking relays! I know if I went to LED lights, wired stock with no upgraded harness, I wouldn't overload stuff and it would work but I hate LED lights. Any ideas?

 

[Jeevy]

Did you replace the relay under your dash you heard clicking? If not it may have shorted and is grounding and overloading the other relay’s. Other than that the only other thing I know of would be grounds, make sure those are good with no rust underneath them. Hope this helps, good luck keep us posted on what it was

 

[Anak]

I know nothing about the K-suspension system, but I have put my '96 XJ's headlights on relays and it works flawlessly. I used relays from Daniel Stern Lighting, but I don't believe that would make any meaningful difference. I spliced into the headlight harness in order to trigger the relays and ran new wiring into new headlight sockets. I don't know if the K-suspension system works any differently, but I doubt there is a difference between '96 and the previous H.O. years when it comes to the headlight switch.

A poor quality ground to your relays sounds like a good place to start. If not that, then the ground for the headlights themselves. Somewhere you have a bad connection.

 

[Tim_MN]

I use Honda relays in both my XJ's. The less expensive H-4 wire harnesses usually use cheap Chineseium relays.

 

[chewie14]

Thanks for your replies, guys! I'll dive into it hopefully sooner than later because I need to drive this rig at night. I'll keep you guys updated as to what I find, it might be a little bit before I can get to it though! Thanks everybody!