I got new front tires and an alignment on my 2000 DII (original owner) last Friday. (Uneven wear on the old tires and the steering wheel was off-center.)

When I got the truck back and drove it that night, it handled great, but I found that the climate control lights were all off. I assumed they accidentally tripped a fuse or something: there's no way all the individual bulbs could fail all at once. The climate control unit itself is still working just fine: just the lights are not illuminated.

Went back to the shop yesterday, and they denied responsibility for the lights not being illuminated. In particular they said:
1. To do the alignment, they go into the vehicle just to lock the steering wheel. They don't go under the dashboard where the fuses are.
2. The climate control lights are on the same fuse as the unit itself, so if the unit is working, the fuse is fine, so they did not actually check the fuse.
3. The climate control lights are all illuminated by a single LED, not individual light bulbs.

Are they right about 2 & 3? That doesn't seem right to me. And I assume that the fuse could have been tripped inadvertently.

Any idea how this could have happened? Anything about doing an alignment that could cause a fuse to be tripped, other than accidentally hitting a fuse?

 

this should have the info you need about the bulbs.

Edit: the above sentence is hyperlinked.

 

They are correct on the second point- the lights are powered by the same circuit as the unit itself but they are way off on the 3rd point (why do they feel the need to lie about stuff like this?!). There are 5 bulbs in the HVAC header- I forget the base sizes but they can be found somewhere. AB has them but they want $40 plus S&H for a set, it's up to you if that's worth it. Fair warning, I replaced mine with LED bulbs (stock are incandescent) way cheaper and they are too bright for my liking, but not so bad that I'm going to crack the whole thing open again and solder in a resistor, but just a warning.

Now the real problem is that it's very unusual that all 5 would fail at once, you can test them and see if their good with any multimeter

 

Yes, that is the strange thing, since they were working the night before and seem to have all failed between the time I brought the truck in and the time I got it back from them. Especially since the unit itself appears to be functioning normally.

I appreciate the info that the same fuse is responsible for the unit as a whole and the bulbs.

Any tips as to how to remove the unit from the dash? I’ve seen the videos on YouTube, and a friend of mine who is a former fleet mechanic tried his best, but it did not seem to want to come out.

 

click on the link in my previous post.

 

Yes, we did watch that on and other videos, and my friend inserted his screwdriver and did all the things he knew how to do, but it got to the point where it seemed stuck, so that he felt there was a risk that if he pushed any further, it might just break.

 

One follow-up question: if the bulbs in the climate control unit are in fact OK, then is there potentially some other electrical or wiring issue? These bulbs (and of course many others on the dashboard and console) illuminate when the headlights are turned on, so there has to be some electrical connection between them. Is it possible for this to go bad in a localized way so that some lights in part of the console fail to illuminate while others continue to work just fine?

A little further background: Several years ago, the red and blue climate control buttons on the passenger side stopped lighting up. Last year, the clock light stopped lighting up, and it was at that point that I bought new bulbs and attempted (without success so far) to get into these units to replace them. Now, last week, the rest of the climate control bulbs have failed to illuminate. So, again, is there potentially some localized and creeping wiring/electrical issue that could explain this?

 

This is totally baffling I agree
Prob nothing to do with the alignment, unless they killed your battery and jump started it and it caused an issue.
I would just swap in another climate unit (careful, 99-02 are LNF (grey) and 03-04 are black - and see if it fixes the problem. They're cheap and easy to source.