1996 F250 4x4 5.8L replaced dash light bulbs and now ABS light stays on. I'm sure this has been beat to death and I've found the code chart. What are a few of the most common causes to start with. I've had this truck for probably 10 yrs and was always surprised the the A S light wasn't on. No telling how long the bulb was burned out.

 

Start with checking the RABS Codes

Let the RABS controller tell you what it thinks is wrong before jumping to any conclusions.

 

Did you happen to replace it with a LED bulb?

 

if you mean the ABS indicator light yes I replaced it with an LED bulb. I replaced all the dash lights with LEDs. Does this cause problems? I found the wire to ground and count the flashes but didn't mess with it tonight. Several bulbs were burned out or not working when I replaced them.

 

Yes, LED bulbs will always stay illuminated when used in the ABS indicator. The ABS trickles a very small amount of current through the bulb circuit. This is normal not a a problem with incandescent bulb because they require a few watts to illuminate. But the LED is more efficient and will illuminate with just the trickle current. Change that be back to an incandescent and it'll probably solve your problems.

 

Thanks. I'll get that one changed back out soon. Definitely better than an ABS problem.

 

Same thing happens when brake light bulbs are replaced with LED. It changes the resistance in the circuit and can cause E4OD shifting issues. There a a few threads about that happening.

I don’t understand the trend of changing interior or exterior bulbs to LED. I could not tell you the last time I have had to change any of the old incandescent bulbs because it burnt out.

 

Yea I wasn't going to do the LED deal but was constantly having trouble with the incandescents on the flatbed so changed them to LEDs. Once I did that and they looked so much better I went down the old rabbit hole. I've tried to pay attention to any issues and have been doing one lighting system at a time so a bunch of things don't pop up at once. The only issue so far has been the ABS light, but some of the cluster lights were burned out so I was unsure. I'm going to check things out again tonight. One of my big concerns was fast blinking blinkers but they work fine and that might be because I went with a good quality incandescent on the front blinkers. I read an article earlier about soldering a 180 ohm 2watt resistor into the trailer light connector to fix the brake light issues with LEDs so may do that. I hate to pull the cluster to change the LED ABS light but will do that as well.

 

Thanks for posting this it saved me allot of time. I noticed that with the key on check the light was really bright but with the truck running the light was dimmer but still pretty bright. After changing back to incandescent bulb things went back to normal.