There is a blinking red light in the lower right hand corner of the radio panel of my "97 528i. It is just to the right of the button that has a small clock face on it that I push when I want to set the clock. I looked in my owners manuals for both the car and the radio which said it had something to do with circulating the heat when the car was stopped. I took it to my local dealer here in Berkeley, CA and a Service Manager tried to turn it off and was not successful. He suggested ignoring the problem. He also said some of the cars came with this heat circulation feature but mine is not one of them. Two questions: Do you know of a way to turn the light off? Is there any connection with the light being on and the fact that my air conditioning is not functioning. Are they inter related in any way?
My understanding for those cars that are equipped, the red indicator light is the parked-car ventilation system. If you do not have that timer function then your MID (display panel) could have a logic fault. You could try removing the fuses for the radio. Or better yet remove the battery cable for about thirty minutes allowing the system to reboot. Hope this helps.
Another way to reboot the whole system is to touch the battery cables together, positive to negative. when i was at the dealer, the Mech who worked on my car told me that that is how to reset a BMW.....hope it helps.
The difference between the two techniques is the 30 min disconnect lets the capacitors drain slowly via the lower standby current requirements. Touching the posative and negative together (or just grounding the posative) dumps the caps quickly. I can see why mechanics would like this method, as it's fast. I honestly don't know if there are any risks associated with them... Matt
i would think theirs no risk with the tapping of the two together seeing as BMW mechs do it but who knows i guess....
I worked at the dealership here in Atlanta for a while and because of possible risks we would not reccomend this. If you short them together, place a 1000 ohm resister ( from radio shack) between the leads to absorb any power. This will dump the memory in all the computers. The dealer should of put it on their computer system (DIS) and read any faults and erase them.
