Hi everyone - I have a problem that I need to share...
Recently I have found that the battery on my van has been failing. So I got my other battery charged up and dropped that in. Everything was fine....until a week later when I was not using the van and the same thing happened again.
In fact on Thursday I fitted a fully charged battery and drove to work and it drove great. Finished work 8 hours later and it started fine. On the way home I stopped at the shop and switched the van off. 2 minutes later came out and the van wouldn't start! I spent the next hour waiting for recovery and all that was need was a jump start. It was the dark and had to have the lights on. Every time the revs dropped the lights faded badly so I had to try to keep the revs up all the way home. I parked up and switched off and tried to start again - nothing it was dead!
I have a volt meter on the dash and that was reading 14 volts while the revs were up but it would drop below 10V when at idle so I know the generator is working. I would have thought the drive to work would have charged the battery up enough to cope with the rest of the day but not.
The other night I did some tests. I removed the battery cable from the negative and put a volt meter on the neg battery post and on the neg cable. The meter came up to 12V. Does this mean its is drawing 12v when just parked?? I remove each fuse one by one. One fuse when removed caused the volts to drop to about 6v. This seems to be the accessory feed so I discounted the radio but that didn't change anything. I then took the positive off the cigarette lighter (with the fuse in) and that seems to cause a drop from 12v to 6v. However something is still drawing another 6V.
So I have bought a new battery but I still seeing that 6V draw when parked up?? What can it be and is that enough to kill the battery overnight?
I'm stuck here so any help would be appreciated. At present I am discounting the battery at night to stop it being flat in the morn!
Recently I have found that the battery on my van has been failing. So I got my other battery charged up and dropped that in. Everything was fine....until a week later when I was not using the van and the same thing happened again.
In fact on Thursday I fitted a fully charged battery and drove to work and it drove great. Finished work 8 hours later and it started fine. On the way home I stopped at the shop and switched the van off. 2 minutes later came out and the van wouldn't start! I spent the next hour waiting for recovery and all that was need was a jump start. It was the dark and had to have the lights on. Every time the revs dropped the lights faded badly so I had to try to keep the revs up all the way home. I parked up and switched off and tried to start again - nothing it was dead!
I have a volt meter on the dash and that was reading 14 volts while the revs were up but it would drop below 10V when at idle so I know the generator is working. I would have thought the drive to work would have charged the battery up enough to cope with the rest of the day but not.
The other night I did some tests. I removed the battery cable from the negative and put a volt meter on the neg battery post and on the neg cable. The meter came up to 12V. Does this mean its is drawing 12v when just parked?? I remove each fuse one by one. One fuse when removed caused the volts to drop to about 6v. This seems to be the accessory feed so I discounted the radio but that didn't change anything. I then took the positive off the cigarette lighter (with the fuse in) and that seems to cause a drop from 12v to 6v. However something is still drawing another 6V.
So I have bought a new battery but I still seeing that 6V draw when parked up?? What can it be and is that enough to kill the battery overnight?
I'm stuck here so any help would be appreciated. At present I am discounting the battery at night to stop it being flat in the morn!
