This is mundane, but certainly not pointless because it was an incredibly easy fix to a couple of irritating problems we were having in our Nissan Altima. Therefore it must be shared.
First the backstory. We bought this car almost new (it had been a Nissan corporate car and only had 2000 or so miles on it), and it came with AC and a stereo including a single-disc CD player. This was nine years ago.
Fast forward to last summer, about a year ago, when my SIL gave us a Magellan navigator. As it happens, I drive a good deal more than my wife, and when I do drive it’s usually just a very short distance and not worth putting in a CD. When we drive someplace together we usually end up driving farther or going to more places than I do by myself, so we spend a lot more time in the car. But this scenario happens a lot less frequently, so it took us a long while to notice that the CD player had stopped working. We would insert a CD and it would appear to work for a second or two, possibly to the point of actually playing a bar or two of music, but then spit it out and display “ERR” in the LEDs. I googled for some possible answers but failed to find any less complicated than “remove entire dashboard assembly, grind synthetic sapphire lenses from best Kashmiri ice sapphire, rebuild CD player and reinstall”. OK, they weren’t that complicated, but anything beyond checking the fuses is too deep for me. Meanwhile, the AC continued to whirl its fans and blow air around the car interior, but no longer cooled the air.
So moving forward to yesterday, when we were in the car for a good two hours, Java Woman suggested, “Why don’t you unplug that thing from the lighter socket?” She meant the power adapter for the Magellan, which we’d been leaving in place whether or not we were actually using the navigator.
And now everything works! Evidently the power drain of the Magellan power cord was preventing an adequate supply of power to reach the AC and CD player. Never did I once think of it, but it makes sense–presumably it’s a built in protection of the electrical system to prevent the battery from being drawn down down faster than the alternator can replace it.