I've recently bought a 1999 E200 Elegance saloon and have noticed that the light which illuminates the right hand side of the centre console instruments has stopped working. Fuse checked out OK so presumably the cause is a dud bulb....but how do I get to it to replace it? I'm worried about breaking anything because I've heard that I'll have to re mortgage my house and sell my wife and children into slavery to pay for any new parts. Can anybody out there help?

 

center console instruments? what next to the shifter? window switches? or on the radio dashboard?climate control?

 

the air distribution switch, just above the radio on UK market models...no longer illuminated like the temperature switch on the r/h side....and if you passed me on the right where I live, that's exactly what I'd expect you to do

 

if your climate control unit looks like this....it only has 1 bulb. you need to pull out the unit to replace the bulb. 1 small bulb that twists out. so if only half the unit is lighting up, then the unit is bad. if your talking about the digital display being half out..then there is no bulb for the pixels only for the button illumination and display background.

 

I'm sorry, I'm not explaining this problem very well...the bulb that has gone duff is in what you call the radio dashboard...it illuminates the separate switch that directs warm air to different areas of the car and the thumbwheel which raises or lowers the heat level. On UK cars, this is on the left of the radio dashboard and the fan switch is on the left. I hope this is a little clearer...as Winston Churchill once observed, we are two nations separated by a common language (or something like that)

 

sorry, the air direction switch is on the RIGHT on uk cars

 

Okay you have a different climate control unit than the usa cars have. 1996 and up has the digital display like I posted... I do believe that your unit does have bulbs in them. but I don't know what your climate control unit looks like. On our older cars the ***** can be removed (air direction ****) and there is a bulb behind the ****. depending on the type of control unit you have.. the **** will pull off.. then you need a small vacuum hose or needle nose tweezers to pull out the bulb. The distribution **** will pull off.

 

heres a pic for bulb replacement on older climate control units. is this the type you have?

 

No unfortunately...in my car, the switch **** pulls off as you suggested, but it just reveals the internal mechanism for the air distribution system and I can't see a way of getting to the bulb, which I can see but can't get to. Have any members with UK market cars done this job and if so, how?