i have a stereo system in my car and it was put in by professionals. today i was driving and everything was ok, then all of a sudden my headunit turned off and theres no power to that or my clock. i no there is no power to my headunit becuase it is supposed to show me the time when off but there is nothing. did i blow a fuse? also, after i pulled over and turned my car off to look at my wiring, my alarm turned on and i couldnt disarm it with my remote. i then figured that i could disarm it by using the keys in the door. any help will be greatly appreciated. and i have a 96 if that matters. thanks.

 

It does sound like you blew a fuse. You can check the fuse box (could be in the passenger compartment by the driver door) or under the hood (look at the one labled "radio"). However, your fuse should not blow unless something is hooked up wrong. In my experiance, fuses usually blow when there is some sort of short (live wire on the circuit touching a ground). Other than that, they should last a very long time.

Also, the fact that your alarm went off seems wrong as well. It could be that they tapped the power for the head unit off of one of the wires for the alarm (although I cannot confirm this without actually looking at the car). I would take it back to the shop who installed it and get them to fix the problem. Even if a fuse fixes it, I think that would just be temporary. Find out if they used a wiring harness or just cut the existing one (which could have lead to using the wrong wire for power).

The other thing to check is if the stereo has a bad ground. No power on a radio is one of the easiest things to fix because there are really only 4 things that could be wrong:

1) Bad power wire
2) Bad ground
3) Bad Fuse
4) Bad radio

Don't think that because someone is a "professional" they automatically know what they are doing. I learned this the hard way, but in the end it worked out. Now I can do it myself!

 

Thanks for your reply. I looked at my fuse this morning and I found that the radio fuse blew. After replacing it everything works fine now. I hope this doesnt happen again because I was freaking out pretty bad. Thanks again.