I don’t want to encourage nor discourage you from this. Just understand it before deciding what o do it. It’s your truck and you should enjoy it however you want. Think of this like adding a CB or aftermarket stereo. A feature you could enjoy that future truck owners wouldn’t even take notice of PROVIDED there is never a fault in the system.
There is good and bad to a floating ground system.
Doing this to just that circuit rather than the entire harness complicates the hiccups somewhat. Floating ground is simply the ground wire for that circuit goes from the battery all the way to the devices in that circuit and never touch the chassis/body.
In your case you would need to remember where you made that circuit float and temporarily reground it after you undo the diodes. And this is only when hunting for an open or short of something in that harness or circuit. So you’re only adding maybe 2 minutes. But if you don’t remember this detail and have a problem later it could really throw you for a loop. Even if you have an open or a short in a different circuit- because the ground is both floated and chassis grounded it could complicate finding a short in a nearby circuit that doesn’t share the same harness.
So if you do it, make it easy to temporarily unplug snd plug back in. Then have the ground wire where you attach a ground clamp easy and the other end ofnthat grounding jumper wire to the body ground for searching. You wouldn’t have to always do it hut if you are 5 minutes into not finding a problem- you then do it real quick.
A floating ground is a better system for electronics but is more expensive to make. It will probably become the standard as new cars use more and more electronics.
Hmmwvs/ Hummers (H1 style) use a floating ground for the entire truck. Currently there is a Hummer owner who was a top notch diesel mechanic for years in the military and civilian after that, now about 70ish, that isn’t as good as he was but still better than average diy guy with skills on vehicles. Electrical wasn’t his strong suit but wasn’t bad at it either. He is a week into chasing a shorted circuit and trying to avoid ripping his entire dash and ajoining harness out of the truck to find it. He has the powerprobe master kit with short finder tool in it and understands proper use. He will get it but the normal time it takes to find a short circuit in a floating ground system is about 10 times as long as a grounded negative system like most vehicles have. Granted not as spry means it’s taking longer but that is only half the headache.
Why is it hard to find? A short either connects two circuits together- like turn on the radio and the headlights come on for some reason. Well those to wire got shorted (connected) together. Or the far more common: the radio wire rubs against the body somewhere and wears a hole in the insulation which pops a fuse to the radio.
Tools like the compass trick or the short finder from power master or other manufacturers send a tone signal on that radio wire and receive it on the other tool wire you connect to the chassis ground. The detector locates where the signal is strongest and gets louder or sweeps a needle back and forth more vigorously the closer you get to the location of the short (like playing colder/ hotter /on fire with where is my shoes hidden).
But when the ground wire is just like another wire in the harness and never has a separate area- the tools can not detect where the energy goes from positive side to negative side. So instead of the kid saying cold, cold, a little warmer, warmer, warm, hot, really hot, on fire (and now you see the shoes)… the tools just say warm warm warm warm warm warm the entire time.
The fix is to go to every single point of contact between the power and ground and disconnect them, then the tool will work. For hummers this means all the grounding pins that the harnesses all connect together, and removing all light bulbs, and unplugging all electronics. So a quick 6 hours work if you are physically fit and know where they all are before being to use the tool to find the short (or open circuit because it is found using same electrical principle just different tool).
Why do hmmwvs/hummer have it? The steel frame is NOT a one piece frame it all bolts together and doesn’t carry electrical ground well. Also the body is aluminum and having electricity make electrical connection from steel to aluminum or copper to aluminum makes the already bad galvanic corrosion of dissimilar metals become a more advanced process called electrolysis. So the softer metal wears away much faster.
This is a lesson many of the ford truck owners with aluminum beds, roofs, etc are gonna have a painful lesson in. Imagine all you added is a backup light to help out your reverse light or maybe some offroad lights and you now need to repair what seems like horrible rusting in the aluminum body parts.
