If your climate control bulbs aren’t lighting up this article should help you determine the cause. First a disclaimer everyone’s situation is different the reason your bulbs may not be working may not be the same reason as someone else, if you proceed to troubleshoot and cause damage to your vehicle you are solely responsible.
My situation is:
Only a few lights don’t work:
This is most likely due to bad bulbs please check your Acura parts source for the correct part number for your vehicle Type S bulbs are different. Here are the common part numbers
39055-SEP-A31
39055-SEP-A22
39054-SEP-A01
None of my lights work:
The first step here is to check your fuses and make sure none are blown the TLs electrical system is pretty tied together and if one fuse goes out it sometimes takes out another, also the illumination fuse is under the hood and in the kick panel so both must be good for the lighting to work correctly.
All of my my fuses are good but no lights work:
This is the worst one. According to https://acurazine.com/forums/3g-tl-problems-fixes-114/light-bulbs-around-navigation-screen-out-851060/ and other posts/forums this leads to the electronics within the climate control display going bad. This happens when you put a bulb in the wrong orientation or put the wrong bulb in a location. This means that the electronics inside the board must be repaired and we currently don’t know anyone who does this repair. This almost always leads to just having to replace the climate control display. If you have navigation yes this means the entire navigation screen. Before condemning the climate control you can try replacing the bulbs to see if maybe they all just went out at once, this can happen but it is very rare.
Climate control displays are not interchangeable between all TLs only from models 04-06 and then 07-08 so a 2008 display will not work in a 2004 and vice versa.
Can I replace the bulbs with LED lights?
Yes you can we don’t really know too much about this topic but you would need nano wedge bulbs that are 14v and 8v and the color you want them to be.
Yes I was replacing one of my Climate control bulbs in my 2004 Acura with a screwdriver and while I was doing that something happened that all the lights on both sides Went out. I check the fuses inside the car and they were all good. Would you know what would caused that.
Hey, it sounds like you fried the internal transistors of the board for the display. Unfortunetly we don’t know of a fix. This means you will most likely have to replace the climate control display.