hids wont ignite when cold and truck on

[kickass audio]

Heres my little dilemma that i still need to troubleshoot but needed to see if anyone else incurred this with their hid's. What i have going on is that when my truck is running and i attempt to start my low beam hid's the driver side will not ignite but the passenger side does. They are both seperated for this exact same problem so both sides have a seperate relay, ballast, and obviously bulb. I can hear both relays clicking so that shows it is getting the signal to turn on the relay and provide power to the ballasts to ignite both lights. I had this problem yesterday when i was going to class but i was able to resolve it by turning my low beams on and off several times to fix it. Today that didnt work. It was 40 degrees outside yesterday but 20 today. I did the same thing as yesterday where i remote started my truck (it keeps my hid's off the entire time until i unlock the truck and it flashes them on and off fast then stops, i tried to find a way to disable this or cut the wire with no help), but when i get in my truck and take it off remote start mode and put it into normal mode the driver side light wont ignite. I tried the same thing i did yesterday with turning the lights on and off several times with no success. I tried for 2 minutes with no success so i said fuck it and put on my fog lights and drove home with one low beam and 2 working fogs. When i got home i tried again with the same failure. So i turned my truck off and turned the lights on and like magic they both worked without a glitch. I turned them on and off for over 2 minutes. So i then tried to turn my truck on and thats when i noticed that the driver side light would get slightly dimmer after the vehicle was on and running but would get brighter once i shut it off. So i decided to turn on the truck and get both lights working, turn the lights off, and try to turn them back on and the driver side failed to light. So pretty much to sum up this huge ass post when my truck is running and i attempt to turn on my hid's the one light will fail to fire. I didnt get into details of troubleshooting this yet as it was midnight and im not working this late at night in the dark to break something off.

Do you think this could be the ballast or bulb? Im really thinking its the ballast that has a problem since the light will work without any problems if the truck is not running or its warmer out.

Let me know what you guys think!!

[bassrace]

Weird.... My drivers side light did'nt turn on yesterday after I flipped my lights of then back on it worked.... I wonder what that's about, I was thinking it was the ballast also....

[tlee2]

Cheap ballast tend to do that. Especially in the cold man. What brand?

[kickass audio]

Its really weird. I do have a tiny capacitor wired to my drl's but that would be bypassed when i turn the lights on my dash. I will try to disconnect the cap tomorrow and re-check all the wiring. I am not going to swap bulbs though because the light on my passenger side the clip that holds it on is broken in half so the light is barely held in with the busted bracket and im not cracking it in the cold.

edit: it is not a cheap ballast. Its all futurevision hid.

Edited December 11, 2011 by kickass audio

[kickass audio]

Just incase anyone has this problem i thought i would post the fix to this. I went out and swapped hid's, ballasts, and relays to find out one ballast is bad. So this problem is caused by a bad ballast, not wiring or the bulb.

[tlee2]

Thats weird. I had all kinds of problems with hids till i switched to future vision. Maybe you just had bad luck with yours

[bassahaulic]

That's very weird.

What's the warranty on the ballasts?

[miniSPLlancer]

I have a 08 lancer and mine did the exact same thing. Mine was hooked up to the factory harness. Since my car has daytime running lights for some reason it prevented both from coming on at the same time unless I turned on and off the low beams. I called Mitsubishi about this and they told me it was because I the daytime running and it could eventually burn out my PCU. so I just ran my own 5 pin relays that I picked up for like $2 and made the side markers the trigger wire, HID's are fine now with no problem.

[kickass audio]

The warranty i believe is 1 year. Futurevision is a great company so im not trashing them at all. In fact im very pleased with the help i have received from them with everything i did to my lights. I had a capacitor mod to help boost the voltage of my drl's but that didnt change a single thing so i disconnected it. My relay is hooked to the stock wire to trigger it to turn on but its still getting raw power from the battery. I only had one other problem with my futurevision hid's where the one bulb had a hard time firing no matter what the temperature was or what ballast i used. It turned out that the wire had a break in it but Bruno at futurevision hooked me up and sent me a replacement bulb for no charge. They stand behind their product and have excellent customer service for it as well.