Electrical gremlin #1 Rear window wiper and defroster that didn't work. The light showed up on the switch but neither worked. I traced it to some sliced wires in the wiring harness inside the drivers side rear wheel well. The harness had been resting on a sharp piece of sheet metal and sliced through half of the 12 or so wires in the harness. Pulled the harness apart and soldered all the cut wires back together. Everything works now except the intermittent feature on the wiper, still cant figure that one out.
Electrical gremlin #2 Jeep would randomly black out. I would walk up to it, unlock it with the keyless entry and everything is fine. Open the door, lights come on inside, shut the door, put the key in the ignition and turn, nothing. Just black. As if the battery went from fully charged to completely dead in 1 second. Sit there for a minute, turn it off/on/off/on for a while, randomly it would start. Drive it down the road, think everything is fine, at 55mph it would go black. No power anything, no brakes, pray I could steer it to the side of the road, don't turn the key off and lock the steering column. This happened a few times over the period of a few weeks last winter in Wisconsin well after sunset when it was cold as a witches teet outside. Call someone to jump it, that would take multiple tries before it would actually start. Limp it home, brake torquing the whole way in first gear because it would die if the rev's dropped below 1000rpm. Replace battery, CPS, NSS nothing. Test alternator, fine, test starter, fine. Search
, turns out all I needed to do was clean the grounds in the engine bay. Holy shit I wish I knew how sensitive the grounds were when I first had this problem. BTW, the grounds are different for different year XJs and they aren't all easy to see/find but you can find where they are if you search. This might be the best preventive maintenance you can do. CLEAN YOUR GROUNDS!!!
Electrical gremlin #3 Random window switch problems. So about the same time I had the rear wiper/defroster problem I had a radio/passenger front and rear window problem. Randomly I would push the passenger front window down button and the radio would shut off and the passenger REAR window would go down. The rear window would go partially down and stop working. The window would proceed to NOT go back up! Luckily this only happened on dry, relatively warm days. All the while the front passenger window switches would work only when they wanted to. In an effort to alleviate this I replaced the drivers door "master" window switch, passenger door window switch, remove and re-install the stereo including rewire all 4 speakers with after market speakers and wiring. Coat everything liberally in dielectric grease and to no avail the gremlin is still there. To this day I can be driving along and watch the light go off and on in the passenger front window switch. If it comes on I try to push the switch either on the drivers master switch or the passenger front door but nothing happens except the light turns off, the window does not move. At least my radio doesn't shut off and the rear passenger window doesn't stick. I still haven't figured this one out.
There is NOTHING that trumps electrical gremlins.
