HELP: Hella 500 are dead

I went to switch on my Hella 500's a few days ago and they didn't turn on. I installed them about a year ago and everything worked perfectly.

The Hella's are installed behind my Satoshi (thanks, Homer) and wire through my firewall and the switch is in the standard switch spot to the left of my steering column, on the dash. I checked the 2 fuses that came with the Hella lights and they're fine. I also checked all the wire splices, grounds, and battery connections and everything is fine.

The only thing I can imagine happened is that my battery died a few weeks ago and, in the midst of jumping it at 6 am in the dark, I could've done something that blew the bulbs. I'm skeptical of this because the connection goes:

lights------fuse-----battery

So any short should've cause a fuse to blow, right?

Also, I've been wanting to do a HID swap to the Hella's, so if I can definitely prove that it's blown bulbs due to my incompetence, I'd rather buy the HID kit outright, opposed to buying replacement Hella's to check.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Got a multimeter or a spare 12v bulb? Bulb size doesn't matter.

Do you have your switch on the ground or on the hot side of your lights?

Use the multimeter to check if you have power to the Hellas with the switch on. If no power, check it going into the switch. If power, check ground continuity.

If everything is good, then it's your bulbs... Sounds more like a bad ground, burned up switch, or power to the switch for both of them to go out at the same time.

 

try swaping out the relay for a known good one. its possible you smoke checked it during jumping. a relay that clicks when powered can still be bad.

 

Got a new relay yesterday and nothing happened. I'm going to re-check all the connections today and see if anything happens. If not, I'll probably go ahead and order some HIDs.

 

Finally fixed it. I completely disconnected all the wires and re-connected them. The culprit was the relay hot wire...it wasn't connected to the positive battery terminal. Looking at it previously, I simply saw the hot wire coming from the lights on the positive terminal and didn't even think about the relay hot wire. So yeah, it's a Christmas miracle.