All of the above I believe is related! I'll try to explain.

There's been a drain on the battery. It's coming from Fuse #4 (which is the only hot fuse when the car is off.) When I start the car for the first time during the day, it's dead.

Until I can track this down I've been pulling fuse 4 when I park the car.

Around the same time that this started happening my instrument panel lights stopped working entirely. I know the rheostats on these cars (and every Volvo I've owned actually) are kinda flimsy, but I've never had one just die with out warning. (Usually I can at least make the lights flicker on an otherwise dead rheostat).

Poking around under the dash to see if I could find something, I found a loose wire, pictured below (drivers side):



(I apologize for the poor quality of the picture, My cell phone is the only camera I have access to at the moment.)

The red arrow shows the wire I discovered not connected to anything. It's a brown wire. It comes out of the sheath where the wires that connect to the black 6 pronged connector come from. Here's another picture that shows where the wire comes from a bit clearer.



The red arrow again shows the wire I discovered. The blue arrow shows the black connector I was talking about in the paragraph above.

What does this brown wire do? I looked at a wiring diagram of the car but didn't see any brown wires associated with the rheostat. Is it possible this is leading to my dead battery? Is the wire related to my dead battery / rheostat?

Thanks as always.
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Formerly 'HearToTemptYou'