Repairing cigarette lighter power supply in vehicle - troubleshooting

[J Boogie]

Trying to repair the 12v power in my wife's 2004 mitsu outlander before a road trip. 

The cigarette lighter was loose in its socket, so I opened up the panel and discovered that a little plastic piece holding it in place had snapped.  Seems inevitable given that it's a very little plastic piece and people just go all out ripping stuff out of that socket.

Anyways, it had stopped working.  I figured I might as well replace the thing with a slick new 2-USB port as long as I had to replace it, worked just fine, only ten bucks, looks pretty sweet.  Still didn't work.  Got a new fuse.  Still doesn't work.

Wiring looks fine, nothing melted - black to negative, white to positive, seems like it should work fine.

Doesn't seem like there are any bad relay issues involved, every other electric function is working.

Anyone have any idea what else I can do to get this thing working?

Thanks in advance!

[zolotiyeruki]

Grab a wiring diagram from a Haynes/Chilton manual, get a multimeter, and start poking around.  Trace the circuit from the battery toward the socket, testing for voltage along the way until you figure out where it's broken.

[Papa Mustache]

Pull the wires off of the back of the socket and test with a multimeter. I suspect you either have a bad socket, or a bad fuse. I more remote possibility would be an ignition switch going out.

My older VW does that occasionally b/c VW did a lousy job of accounting for the number of amps they were running through a small plastic switch. In my case the cost is $12 and the time is half-an hour.

If you have a good fuse and no power at the socket wires then use the multimeter is see if power is on the incoming side of the fuse and the outgoing side of the fuse.

I can provide more detail if you like. Don't want to write a ten page procedure only to have you figure it out on sentence two. ;)