mcgilles

if I remember correctly the C5 will turn off your parking lights, headlights, fog lights etc after a certain amount of time if left on. the delay seems to be pretty long, like 45mins or more. can anyone confirm this is true? I know the interior lights will time out if you leave a door or the hatch open. and the hood light used to before I messed up the circuit and had to fix it by powering it with B+

SCM_Crash

I don't think it's on a timer. I believe when the battery gets to a certain level it shuts them off. I know it shuts my hood light off after 10 minutes, but I think the rest is by battery voltage.

Although, I could be wrong.

Patches

From the SM:

Battery Rundown Protection / Inadvertent Power

The BCM controls the lighting system through circuits that enable both the exterior lamp functions of the park lamps, the head lamps, the fog lamps, and the interior lamps. The BCM opens these enabling circuits 20 minutes after the ignition switch is turned OFF with no lamp switch activity. If the ignition switch is turned to any position other than OFF, or if a lamp switch is activated during this 20 minute period, the timer resets for another 20 minutes.

mcgilles

cool! that's exactly what I wanted to know. the owner's manual says that for the interior lights the timeout is 15 minutes (I think that's what I read) if you leave a door open.

thanks!

imavettegirl

service manuals rock.

mcgilles

so true! and one thing I've liked a lot about my service manual is that it explains much more about the car's features than the owner's manual does. I didn't think to pull it out to look this up but that would have been a great place to do so. I searched through the pdf version of the owners manual and found info about the interior lights but not the timeout on the exterior ones. I didn't do an extensive search just a quick key word.

reading through the service manual is fascinating though. I learned all kinds of great stuff about how the car handles out of voltage spec situations when I noticed my car running a little high last winter. I was setting as much as 15V from the alternator and was worried about damaging electronics. reading through the manual I found that the C5 has protection circuits to kill power to the electronics to save them from being fried if the voltage gets too high. also that for those protections to activate the voltage has to be 19+V for a couple minutes or something like that. I don't remember the exact spec. but it was really neat to read about. put my mind at ease. 15 may be higher than usual but nothing to worry about at all.

mcgilles

I didn't do a very scientific test with a timer or anything but I left my parking lights on only in the garage last night for over 20 minutes and they were still on when I went back to check. does the timeout change with model year? I guess I'll have to time it to make sure if that 20 minutes but I actually think I left it there for over an hour. I know the interior lights turn off after 15 minutes as they should even if a door/hatch is left open.
another thing I noticed is that the illumination for the door/window controls on each door stay on for a long time. much much longer than the rest of the interior lights when you close the door. is that normal? none of the other instrument or control lights stay on, just the ones on the door panels. I figured maybe it was designed that way for ppl who might turn the car off in the dark and not get out for a while, the buttons to unlock the door stay illuminated longer?
would LED conversions affect any of this? all my exterior and interior lights except for a few warning lights in the instrument cluster are LEDs (HID heads/fogs of course). I wonder if that could affect it?

more background as to why I'm asking the question: I have an aftermarket alarm which has a courtesy lights feature. I have it set to turn on the parking lights, front flood lights (LEDs I added) and backup lights for 30 seconds after I unlock the car, or turn the car off. I like this feature as many newer cars are doing this now. unfortunately I didn't go through all the trouble of disabling the lights left on warning chime when the lights are controlled by the alarm processor. I know I could do it, but I didn't want to cut up that much of the factory wiring. so unless I sit in the car for 30 seconds or more I get the warning chime every time I get out of the car. I've gotten used to it and ignore it now of course, which has resulted in me leaving the parking lights on a couple of times. I'm not worried about it, with an optima battery and all LEDs I could probably leave them on for a couple of days (assuming there's no timeout) and the car would still start. I don't want to test that theory however...I want to know I can count on the BCM to kill the parking lights after a time if I leave them on. timeout could be a couple hours and that would be fine, but if they are going to stay on permanently that's not cool.

maybe I should just set it up to disable the chime when the alarm turns on the lights? but to do so and keep the chime working if the driver really does leave the lights on would require a relay, a diode (or 2 relays), and some hacking to the factory wiring which I really don't want to do.

mcgilles

testing it now. no particular reason I just want to feel confident that features like this work.

lights have been on for 30 minutes now and they haven't timed out yet. where in the service manual does it say this? I looked at the schematics for the parking lights and it looks to me like they are powered by a hot at all times circuit that runs straight to the switch and then to the lights...the only relay I see is the one that allows the BCM to turn the lights on. I'm sure I'm just missing it but I'm curious and looking for info.