2000 Range Rover County- Battery Issue

On or around Wed, 12 Apr 2006 02:42:25 GMT, PareReposte enlightened us thusly:

There is a known issue with these vehicles - some stuff (Oregon weather stations are a known culprit) can cause the effect you describe.

Try making a faraday cage inside the garage?

I reckon it's battery vampires, they come in the night and suck the essence from the battery. You can get rid of them by creating a ring of rechargable torch batteries as an appetiser, the battery vampires eat them whole and once inside, the rechargables drain the power from the battery vampire, and in the morning you can put the empty vampire corpse in the rubbish bin.

If that's not the case, rig up an ammeter in line with the battery, and start taking fuses out to find out what's really draining the power. Removing fuses will narrow it down to something that exists.

It's a well known problem (not just LR's) - buy how you solve it is a bit tricky - short of unplugging eveyones electronic gizmo's!

Richard

If you can't isolate whatever it is that is keeping the vehicle awake you only really have one course of action, to charge the battery whenever the vehicle is not being used for >2 days. If I was in your situation I would fit a smart battery charger and plug the vehicle in if I knew it was going to be unused for more than a day.

Regards

William MacLeod

Ground the aerial for a tryout, but put a meter in series with the switched off car and the battery. What do you actually see ?

Steve

PareReposte nearly made me spill my Shiraz on 12/04/2006 03:42 by writing:

No chance. Wireless LANs are 2.4Ghz or 5.4Ghz.

But they're close. Anything running on 433Mhz will cause a problem - in my case it was an Oregon Scientific weather station. There is a revised version of the RF receiver - about £120 to replace, IIRC, and can be done as a DIY job.

Codswallop. Absolute tripe. Served in a white wine sauce with mushrooms, shallots and garlic.

Hook an ammeter into the battery lead and watch the current draw. It should drop down to 0.06A or lower 2 minutes after you stop doing things, and then stay there.

When I had the problem it would reliably wake up 30 seconds after going to sleep, with the current draw rising to around 0.5A for the next two minutes.

Andy

On or around Wed, 12 Apr 2006 09:04:00 +0100, beamendsltd enlightened us thusly:

like I say, park it in a faraday cage.

Chickenwire!

Anything running on 433Mhz will cause a problem -.........

Such as some amateur radio systems, car key fob transmitters and lots of other short range radio stuff. Is the a repeater near you? (do a ggogle for amateur radio 70cm repeaters and you should find a site with maps).

Gordon

Not too sure that would be small for 2.4 Gig. 1/4 wave = 31mm ?

Steve

You can always double it up, would still probably be the cheapest method. The weatherstations etc don't work on that frequency though, they use something in the 400-500MHz area IIRC.

However, I doubt anyone's likely to try and solve this problem by wrapping their truck in chickenwire ;-)

Austin.....

He's probably got the chickens.

Steve

On or around Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:30:46 +0100, Steve Taylor enlightened us thusly:

actually, we haven't. Geese, yes.

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 22:08:02 +0100, Austin Shackles scribbled the following nonsense:

and they make excellent guard dogs too do geese.

Beware of geese! We had them roaming in the yard once, and I didn't have to mow the lawn all summer. But when the grass stopped growing, they started eating the Series 1!

You wouldn't think that that flat beak could do any damage, but when we next needed the fog lights they wouldn't work -- they'd chewed the insulation off the cables, and got half way through the conductor wires too. Delicious at Christmas, though -- much tastier than the average guard dog.

Meanwhile, back at the fascinating 'don't-park-your-RR-under-a-phone-pole' topic.........

GRAEME ALDOUS, Yorkshire