Am I on the right path for this headlight issue?

[petebert]

Bought a 05 x5 that had been in a mild front end accident. Passenger side headlight housing was banged up a bit. Bought a used housing off of ebay, put all new bulbs in both housings. On initial try everything except the passenger headlight works. So I start swapping around ballasts, ALC and igniter from "crashed" housing to "ebay" housing. Made no difference. I then swapped the igniter from the good drivers side to the ebay housing and the headlight turned right on. So I jump online and order another igniter off amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1


It appears to be an OEM Hella although at around $50 it's around half the price anyone else has one for. I put it into the drivers side housing and it didn't work. Think I got a bad igniter or is there anything else to check? Only other thing I can think is to swap the amazon igniter into the passenger side and see if it works there.

[andrewwynn]

I would do exactly that. Swap the only unknown.


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[petebert]

Well this just got more complicated. I wasn't going to bother swapping the igniters assuming the Amazon one was bad. Well I took the ebay(passenger) headlight out and decided since I had it out I might as well swap them out. Well the ebay headlight fired right up with the Amazon igniter and the drivers side still isn't working.



If I unplug the passenger side headlight the drivers side will turn on. The ebay headlights motor is making a grinding sound as it goes through it's self adjustment. Vertical seems to be fine but it seems be reaching a limit while turning to the right, makes a grinding sound and then returns to the left. So maybe swap the motor from the "crashed" headlight into the ebay one? The motor in the crashed one appears to be fine.


Googling it a bit, maybe it needs a ALC reset?


Another update, when I switch the headlight switch to automatic the light on the headlight control will blink. No warning messages on the dash.

[petebert]

Final update, problem solved.


When I was originally doing the ALC and ballast swaps I noticed that the ALC and ballast from the "ebay" headlight possibly had corrosion on them. My guess was it was potentially a flood vehicle being that the seller was from Florida. So I swapped the nicer ALC and ballast from my crashed headlight. Just tried swapping the ALC back and everything works now. Not an expert on how the programming of these systems but my guess is the grinding sound was from my ALC not being programmed to the ebay motor?