Blew a fuse the other week for the 12VDC 'cigar lighter' circuit. I have a couple of USB car chargers plugged in the front and rear seat 12V sockets to charge phones and power my dashcam, and ordinarily this works fine. But on this occasion (halfway from Canberra to Sydney) we plugged in the rear one and it must've caused a current spike as the sockets immediately went dead.
I had some difficulty locating the central fuse box because the illustration in the manual is backwards (or is the LHD version).
Managed to find it after consulting YouTube.
I found the fuse puller in the engine bay fuse box alongside the slots for spare fuses... All empty of course
I wanted to have my gadgets, so looked at what I could swap until I could get a replacement 15A blade fuse. I elected to take the fuse for the rear washer, reasoning I could get by without that for the remainder of my trip. This worked to get my 12V accessories back in business.
As it happened, in drizzly weather on the return trip from Sydney I had need of my front windscreen washer... but the washers didn't work front or rear. It seems that disconnecting the rear washer also disabled the front one despite these being individually fused?
When I eventually got a replacement 15A blade and restored the fuse for the rear washer, they both worked again.
The burned out fuse I pulled from the 12V circuit was a different style to all the other blade fuses I observed in the engine and central fuse boxes, so I surmise it was replaced prior to my ownership. Common for the 12V cigar lighter circuit to blow?