w124 Outside Temperature Gauge...

[Ednamillion]

Strange thing happened this morning when I got into the car and turned on the ignition. For the first time since I bought the car (4 months ago) some numbers (10.5C then 11.0C) appeared on the outside temp. display.

Does this point to a faulty connection somewhere rather than the, as I expected, probe and/or display themselves being banjaxed? I carried out some fuse/relay contact cleaning work last week - I cleaned some connectors in the vacinity as well - could this be linked?

Any thoughts welcome,

Edna'...

 

[joneseythedog]

What did you do? My outside temp gauge appears to be non-working, so would be interested to know.

Andrew

 

[Ednamillion]

joneseythedog,

I had a 'massive failure' a week or so ago - wipers, windows, sunroof, headlamp flash, rear window demister all not working. So based on some advice from here I replaced all of the fuses, cleaned all fuse contacts, cleaned all relay contacts and hey presto - all of the above ok!

What I also did was clean any other contacts I could see in the vacinity - one of which was linking the cable that, I guess, feeds into the display through the bulkhead and the cable which tracks it's way through the engine bay down to the probe behind the reg plate. But for some days after I did this the display was still not working - and it still isn't! But I'm taking the fact that the display did register something, albeit for a fleeting moment (but for the first time in 4 months), as a pointer to what the problem might be - i.e. faulty/dirty contacts.

I'll have another go at cleaning some stuff at the weekend and will post any results.

Regards,

Edna'...

 

[Ednamillion]

joneseythedog,

Had another look at this yesterday - no joy, carried out another clean-up of the coonectors I can get my hands on but no sign of any life in the display. If I get another chance to 'fiddle' and something positive comes out of it I will post.

Regards,

Edna'...

 

[alastairadams]

I have a '93 280TE, pre facelift, and wonder where your temperature display is located. Is it in the cluster? I did have a problem with the lights on my tacho which was due to the temperatures behind the clocks. It dried some solder joints out on the dimmer. Just a thought.

 

[Ednamillion]

I have a '93 280TE, pre facelift, and wonder where your temperature display is located. Is it in the cluster? I did have a problem with the lights on my tacho which was due to the temperatures behind the clocks. It dried some solder joints out on the dimmer. Just a thought.

Hi alastairadams,

Yes, the display is centre bottom of the instrument cluster. It is illuminated (when lights are turned on) so I'm assuming the lack of a read-out is not due to some lighting issue. I'm still hoping it's a 'connection' issue...

Thanks for your post,

Edna'...

 

[television]

The sensors behind the bumpers do give problems

 

[Davieross]

Hi,
my 2005 C220i has started to give some "erratic" outside temperature readings. Last night for instance it "hunted" up & down between 18 and 29 on a drive down the A1 from Newcastle.
Does the signal from this have any input to the engine management system - i.e. is the engine constantly being re-tuned for "different" ambient conditions?

Secondly, is it an easy fix?

 

[television]

The fault is normally just the sensor behind the bumper, and no, it is not part of anything else

 

[Richard Moakes]

I have two display units for the W124 external temperature display, one in degC and one in degF.

I never did get round to fitting them on my 300E, anyone wants one, then make me a sensible offer.

Cheers,

Richard

 

[Davieross]

The fault is normally just the sensor behind the bumper, and no, it is not part of anything else

cheers, thanks for that

I'll have a look under there tonight and see if there's anything obviously amiss.