Couldn't find anything in the archives, so here goes: Got home this evening and shut off the car and lights as I always do, noticed the gauge lights stayed on. Tried cycling the lights, ignition, etc. Nothing. Disconnected the battery for a few minutes to let the ECU reset. Nothing. Curiously, the lights on the MFSW and the hash-mark at 6k on the tach DO shut off when the headlight is shut off, but the rest do NOT. Perhaps more curiously, I can usually get the gauge lights to go out by wiggling the e-brake lever just right - But currently the ONLY way to shut them off is to disconnect the battery.

I'm atrocious with electrical issues, any one have any ideas?

 

A NEMINI member suggested that it is probably the body control module. A bit of searching here seems to support that.

How might I diagnose it for sure? It's not exactly a cheap part to replace...

 

Just a thought, but our MINIs do very strange electrical things when our battery starts to fail.

How old is yours?

......Les

 

I had read that somewhere, so I whacked in a known good battery (granted, it was a marine battery and not really wired in well) with no change. I've also had the car on a charger / maintainer to try and account for any loss from the lights running, but it doesn't seem to help. That being said, I do notice that the little "status" light on the OE battery is black (insufficient charge) even when the charger says it's good to go...

 

If the status light on the battery stays black after charging it's time for a new one.

Hope this helps...

 

Put in another supposedly good battery today, this time an Optima 35 Red-Top out of my 240Z autoX car. The charge was down a bit initially since it's been sitting, so I freshened it up and tried it out - Nada. Frakin' lights still stuck on. However, I'm not confident the Optima is actually good - after running the headlights for a minute or so to take the surface charge off the battery, voltage readouts dropped to 12.2-3.

At this point, I'm not sure what to do. I'm not confident that I've thoroughly ruled out a bad battery, but at the same time I'm discouraged because thus far I've made several changes with respect to the battery situation, and none have changed the end result any. And as much as I'd LOVE this problem to be completely battery-related, I don't really feel like JUST the gauge-lights would be effected if it IS a bad battery.