Honda Civic (8th Gen) Footwell LED Lighting Wired to the Courtesy-Light Circuit

Choose your lighting: RickHondaR's replica Honda strips ship with the feed wires pre-soldered and include scotch locks, but any pair of 12 V LED strips is fine. Before fitting, splice a male-female spade connector into each strip lead. This looks like an optional extra, yet it is the single most valuable part of the whole install. If the polarity turns out reversed once everything is buttoned back up, you just unplug at the connector and re-seat it the opposite way instead of fighting the scotch locks a second time. Keep the number of LEDs modest, since overloading the circuit has caused strips to stop working and even blown an LED on first connection.

Begin at the small triangular end cap on the outboard edge of the dash, next to the driver's door. Remove its single bolt and pull it downward to release it. With that cap out of the way, the lower cover beneath the steering column loosens and lifts away, exposing the wiring that runs above the pedals and down the side of the dash.

Low in the dash near the driver's door, behind the fuse box, sits a connector block carrying the switched interior-light feed. The two wires you need are light blue and light green. The block's colour and size vary by model: white on some cars, blue and a little smaller on others, and on the 2.2 five-door it is a light-blue plug carrying five wires — grey, black, light green, plus both a plain blue and a light blue — sitting alongside the large white connector. Whatever the block looks like, the two coloured wires and their position stay the same. Access is tight, so press the release clip with a small flat screwdriver rather than your fingers, and draw the block out toward the door for room to work.

Peel back the insulating tape and open the loom sleeve to expose the light blue and light green wires. Clip a scotch lock onto each, or for a slimmer, more durable joint strip a little insulation, twist the strip lead on and seal with heat-shrink or tape. Wire the strip's positive lead to the blue wire and the negative to the green: blue is +, green is -. Work gently, because these wires are short and hold almost no slack, and more than one installer has snapped the blue wire and had to solder it back together inside the footwell. Keep a soldering iron and heat-shrink within reach before you cut anything.

With the tap made, plug in the strips and operate the car, locking and unlocking with the key or opening and closing the doors, to confirm the lights rise and then fade with the interior lighting. If they stay dark or fade the wrong way, the polarity is reversed: unplug at the spade connector you fitted earlier and turn it round. If you skipped those connectors, touch a multimeter across the two wires to identify the live one. Do not refit any trim until the behaviour is correct.

Feed a length of stiff wire, such as fencing wire, from the driver's footwell over to the passenger side. Run it behind the centre console at the point where the carpet ends rather than through the middle of the console, which is much easier to thread. Hook the passenger LED strip onto the end and draw it back through. Popping off the clip-on panel beneath the glove box gives extra access on that side.

Cable-tie the slack wiring against the dash and console structure so nothing rattles behind the trim. Position an LED strip in each footwell where you want the light to fall and fix it in place, aiming the glow down and outward rather than into the occupants' eyes.

Refit the lower dash cover, the triangular end cap and the glove-box panel. Before you finish, give the wiring a firm shake and cycle the doors once more. Poor joints are by far the most common reason these installs fail weeks later. If any connection drops out under vibration, replace scotch locks or spade clips with crimped joints for a shakeproof result.