Where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50?

Have you tried to add some sort of accessory to your car only to realise that you need it to be switched with the accessories?

What this means is that it turns off when the car is off, for me this happened when I went to install the Gator GRV90MKT reverse camera (eBay) as part of my ongoing 4WD build.

I needed to know where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 / Ford Ranger (same car back then) so that the reverse camera didn’t run the battery down overnight. The Gator GRV90MKT only comes with a cig socket plug, but all of the cig sockets in the Mazda BT-50 / Ford Ranger are, for some reason, permanently powered!

Now luckily I was aware of a handy document that would tell me where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50, it was a Ford document called a Body Equipment Manual.

To read more about how to hardwire a Gator reverse camera, click here.

I also have this post about finding a dash light feed.

*Affiliates Disclosure

Affiliate links are present on this page. Through partnerships with, but not limited to: Amazon, eBay and Commission Factory, I will make a small commission through qualifying purchases. This comes at no extra cost to you and is just a way for me to try and support myself and the blog.  Thank you.

Where to find an ignition feed in a Ford Ranger?

In case you were unaware, the Mazda BT-50 and the Ford Ranger shared the same design up until the latest 2021 releases when Mazda used Isuzu for their car design.

So the things that are mentioned here about where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 are the same as they are for Ford Rangers, this is why this Body Equipment Manual from Ford is relevant to the Mazda.

Why find an ignition feed?

There are some accessories that need to be switched off when you turn the car off, for me it was this reverse camera.

But it might be that you have a power socket feeding something else that you always forget to turn off. Maybe it isn’t powered through a socket but you want to hard wire it.

Things like a UHF, cel-fi booster, USB charging station even some additional lights that you might have added would all benefit from being switched off with accessories if they’re running from the starter battery.

If you have an automatic car, you don’t want a flat because there’s no hill starts or push starts available, you’ll be relying on jumper packs or jumper leads if the starter goes flat.

Body equipment manual

For my specific model of car, the relevant page is as shown below. It points out where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 / Ford Ranger and gives you information regarding relay requirements.

Each model of car will have their own relative information page on where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 / Ford Ranger but it can easily be found.

Just search the document for the work “ignition” and work through the results.

Things to note

There is one very important thing to note here, do not connect accessories directly to this cable!

Tap into this cable, then power a relay from it, if you want to add more things I suggest limiting the power drawn from this cable to the single relay, just have that relay use two outputs to power more than one accessory.

So if you have heaps of stuff to tap into an accessory feed, have relays powering relays.

You could probably do a few relays off this one cable but eventually the BCM (Body Control Module) will throw up fault codes if it detects too high a load being drawn, as it is similar to a poor electrical joint drawing more power than the BCM anticipates.

Below is an alternative BCM design for the Ford Ranger / Mazda BT-50.

Real world example

Now you know where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 / Ford Ranger, let’s look at what this looks like in real life.

Below is the BCM, it is located just above the accelerator pedal on the right hand side of the car, it contains the fuses (there is another engine bay fuse box) and all of these connectors you can see (ignore the numbers I drew on them).

Ignition feed testing

To test the ignition feed you can’t have the plug unplugged, you will not get the results either at the pin of the BCM or at the socket of the plug, the power needs to come through the plug, into the BCM and then back, so the plug must be in.

So to test this you need to remove the back covering, which is what you will see in the image below. The instructions for the removal are also found in the Body Equipment Manual (BEM) but I won’t go through them here as they’re not needed.

You’ll notice that the BEM shows the pin as the bottom left, but that is as you look at the socket, when it is plugged in it is the bottom right cable.

Verifying the ignition feed

This step is unnecessary (testing for voltage is verification), once we know which cable it is we don’t need to know any more than that, however we can check against a workshop manual to see that the cable does what we think.

These workshop manuals can be handy to suss out electrical wiring, I used this to figure out where to connect a kill switch.

The connector arrangement is not as it is physically laid out in the diagram below, nor is it in an order, but the pin we have tested as per the BEM instructions in the image below is D9.

This “D9” cable is referenced in the third line from the top with  “YS” cable colouring, you can trace that line back to the ignition relay “R14”.

That “YS” colour code we can see from the legend in the bottom corner is a core that is yellow with a grey stripe.

Here is the cable that we were testing close up.

Ignition feed confirmed

Those last steps aren’t that important in knowing where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 or Ford Ranger, but it sometimes helps to verify things by working backwards and cross referencing.

The cable might not look yellow, but that is their version of yellow in their wiring looms, it is not a vivid bright yellow.

*Affiliates Disclosure

Affiliate links are present on this page. Through partnerships with, but not limited to: Amazon, eBay and Commission Factory, I will make a small commission through qualifying purchases. This comes at no extra cost to you and is just a way for me to try and support myself and the blog.  Thank you.

Conclusion

Now you know where to find an ignition feed in a Mazda BT-50 or Ford Ranger, just tap into that cable with whatever your preferred method is and find a good spot to mount the relays.

The alternative to this is using a tap-a-fuse type product. These are probably easier to install but I’ve always liked having things hard wired for some reason.

Either way, hopefully this has been helpful.

Thanks for reading.