Footwell Lighting

Just thought I'd post here to give an idea of the approach I used when I finished up the footwell lighting in my Prius C today.

I put a 30 cm LED strip in each footwell, off one 12V power source. I tapped the 12V power source off the dome-light 12V wire, using quick splice connectors, off the wiring harness located in the driver's side a-post. It's pin 2 (I believe, would have to pull the diagram again to check), the wire is blue. I then ran the wire under the dash and around the right side of the vehicle to the back, rather than splicing for 12 V in 4 completely separate places.

Each strip is grounded to the door-switch for each individual door; The front footwells are grounded at the door switch itself in each B-post, but the back doors are grounded off MG1 in the right cowl panel, blue and green wires (pins 7/8), since it's tricky to get to the door switches for the back doors.

All in all, a pretty easy project once I figured out where to get 12V power from. They work quite nicely. I need to swap out the dome light bulbs for LED now to match.

I was surprised at how easy it was to pull interior panels off in this car. Previous cars have been nightmares for pulling panels, this was like a dream. I'd definitely recommend this easy mod to anyone.

 

Re: Rear lights: I mounted them on the top of the battery cover right under the bench seat cushions. (Pic attached). The wires run inside the panel, and up to the passenger front of the vehicle under the passenger side sill trim.


I'm planning to install a switch as well, so that they can be turned on when the doors are closed, but that's still in the works.

 

Sure!

As an update, and somewhat of a request for suggestions... I installed a switch this morning to be able to turn on the lights on-demand; Switch is located underneath the e-brake in one of the empty panels; One pole of the switch was connected to the negative leads on the rear lights, the other was grounded to the battery cable attached to the chassis underneath the rear carpet. Works when you turn the switch on. Now here's the problem:

When I turn the switch on, even if the doors are closed, the car thinks the doors are open because my 12V power comes from the dome light. Seems to me like an easy fix would be to just take the 12V from the battery or an open accessory spot in the fuse box. Does that make sense? Better solution out there? This issue pretty much negates the use of the switch at the moment, because I don't want to deal with the car complaining about open doors.

Edit: I moved the 12V power from the dome-light to a fused link directly on the 12V battery. This did not resolve the issue, as it seems whenever the switch is on, the ground wire for the switched circuit is communicating with the wires going to the ECU for the door sensor, also grounding them. Unless there's some sort of way to re-wire this, the ECU is always going to think doors are open when the switch is on. So it looks like running them with doors or switch is not an option, but rather, one or the other. Meh!

Thanks

 

I think yes, this is my next thing to check on, I'm not an electrician by any means, and my only real training in electronics was a class I took in high school about 14 years ago, so I had forgotten about diodes completely until I started researching.

 

Just checking back in - stuck a diode in line and this did fix the issue! Thanks