Vehicle: 97 Jeep Cherokee XJ Country

This is a truly weird thing that I'm completely lost by and don't understand how this could've happened...

So after over a year of my headliner sagging, I finally got around to taking off the old headliner and replacing it with a new one. I disconnected the ceiling circuit board that's above the rear view mirror, disconnected the dome lights in the middle and rear of the ceiling as well and the rear ceiling speakers. That is all the electrical items I touched when removing the headliner. After scraping off all of the old glue and putting the new headliner on, I put back everything the way I took them apart.

Now this is where I encountered a major electrical issue when starting up my Jeep. It started up just fine, no issues, BUT I cannot lock my doors using the electrical switch (but can unlock the doors), I have no dome lights (central or rear), the radio does not operate, and I have no operational gauges (which is the weirdest thing).


Any ideas or suggestions would be GREATLY APPRECIATED as my Jeep is basically inoperable since I don't have any working gauges.

Thanks!

 

Well, welcome to the forum, and.....Ouch.

Well, the first suggestion I have to offer is a bit of "lessons learned". Don't work on anything electrical until you have disconnected the battery. It's too easy to short something.

I'd start by checking all of your fuses, one by one. No need to pull them out - use a test light to probe BOTH sides of each fuse. If there is power on one side, but not the other, that fuse is blown.

Start with the PDC (black box near the battery), as some of the fuses there feed internal circuits that have their own fuses. No sense testing a fuse that has no power going to it.

Remember that some of your fuses will only have power when the key is on.

 

Yeah, I didn't even think about disconnecting the battery until I already had the dome lights out and it was too late at that point.

I had a fear that I may have blown a fuse and after spending 6 hours replacing the headliner, I figured checking every single fuse one-by-one would probably take a few more hours.

Thanks for the suggestion! I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow.

 

Start with the IOD fuse.

 

That’s exactly what it was, the 15 amp IOD fuse in the engine bay fuse panel. Replaced that fuse and everything worked! Definitely learned my lesson about disconnecting the battery before touching anything electrical.

Thanks for all the help!