Howdy all. I just wanted to get this one on the record here to log the info in case others happen to encounter something similar. I had a problem with the battery being drained flat. A few weeks back I had some repeat instances of dead battery in the morning. I was certain I hadn't left anything on, but come out to find one night about 2 hours after I got home, and it was now dark, that the backlight was still on on the EVIC and the gauges were still lit.
It isn't really visible during the day. Which is why I hadn't noticed it before. I'd seen in several places that this was mentioned that the BCM can stay away while certain messages are continuing to occur on the canbus.
So I tried pulling what is the normal ICC fuse at F70-something and that didn't have any effect, and there was one other fuse under there related to the instrument cluster F49. Pulled that and sure enough that was what allowed the lights to go out. Well also killed steering wheel controls while vehicle is running.
But something stuck in my head about the fact that F49 was ICC/Heat and so logically I thought perhaps something to do with a bad actuator not closing and thus not letting a system do its thing and shutdown. Well I was wrong but it lead me to disconnect the heating control module. With that module disconnected, the evil and gauge lighting shuts down like it should after like 15-20 seconds after locking the truck.
To get to it, you just open your lower glove box and you'll see it directly to the right, in there mounted on the metal frame of the dash, with a 12 or so pin connector plugged right in the middle of it. If I put the F49 fuse back in, but unplugged that module, everything operated as normal minus heat, vent, and fan controls. No more battery drain.
A quick lookup on one of those Mopar parts websites, and $95 + 3 days later and the new part was installed, and all is back to normal.
I will say one thing, when looking those parts up, make sure you follow the list of superceded part numbers to the latest item. This unit had like 5 parts in the trail for me to get to the latest version (68366553AA)
Hope that helps someone who ends up with their EVIC backlight staying on and killing their battery.
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