I am experiencing an intermittent major electrical outage.
I have had the vehicle 5 weeks and the problem has occured twice in the last week.
Remote unlocking OK
Interior light, red LEDs OK.
Turn ignition key and the whole of dash stays blank.
Take key out and try parking lights and they do not work.
A little while later all is fine and working.
12.65V on battery terminals and on the engine block.
The battery terminals look spotless but not greased.
I will disconnect both terminals, clean them with fine emery paper, reconnect and grease em.
I do not know how old the battery is but it is clean although the car has been valetted by a dealer prior to my buying it.
The plastic filler caps do show signs of regular removal.
Amazingly we have had hardly any rain here so I do suspect damp.
Any thoughts or suggestions on the problem?
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Take the car to an auto electricians and have the battery tested - 12.65V unloaded seems a bit low to me, and maybe there is a device that cuts off loads of things when the voltage drops too low.
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This is a known problem due to a poor earth connections. There is a technical service bulletin for it. No 44/2002 dated 25.7.2002. Sorry I can't post it as it is too pictorial.
Your dealer should be able to quickly diagnose which earthing point is suspect.
HTH
Charles
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Do not clean with emery cloth this contaminates the lead with the non contucting grit off the emery cloth. Use a wire brush or a terminat scrubber. I would be looking for an earth problem as wellbut I woulf visit the fuseable links incase of corrosion. Regards Peter
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Ivor thanks for my first move.
SG of cells was 1250 - 1275 and was in the Fair band but close to the Good band.
Put the charger on the battery, on the low setting. It seemed to be taking about 3A but after an hour said fully charged. Halfords did a battery check and the reading said Battery Good.
It has and continues to sart first time.
So am happy that the battery is passable.
Peter
Thanks for that info. I thought Haynes was advocating tools for the job when I had a cheap alternative at hand. Lesson learned.
Charles
At least I am not alone with my problem.
Now I have someting to aim at.
Went to 1st dealer who had no idea about the bulletin
2nd dealer has gone out of business.
My local dealer, walking distance, is booked up for a month.
Charges £90 a hour and is not likely to supply details.
The wiring diagrams in Haynes make light reading!!
It will be solved!
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henry - try a local auto electrician (start with yellow pages). They should be considerably cheaper than the £90 per hour that the main dealer wants, and may have heard of the Technical Bulletin.
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Henry, have you had any luck tracing your bad earth problem? My Mondeo, Mk1 '96 1.8 may be suffering very slightly from the symptoms you describe and I would be interested to know the ECU earthpoint locations.
On a different tack, early Mondeos had a point in the loom from the ECU near the power steering reservoir where there was an octane adjust shorting bridge connector. Bridge in for 95 up, bridge out for 91. I have just found that point on mine and surprise surprise the bridge has never been installed! Perhaps the cars performance will be enhanced when I get a shorting bridge in there!
For information it is a 2 socket connector with one socket going to ground (although mine is about 2 ohms which is a bit high, hence the earthpoint query) the other socket measures about 9.5 - 9.7 volts with the ignition on (but drops when you take current from it).
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Thanks to all for info.
It really is a pain. To date I have had the problem on two occasions, both in my driveway, but with sons Focus on standby.
On return home the same day all was OK. The rest of the time it has been starting first time and behaved itself since.
I looked at Haynes diagrams and found that internal lights are on one fuse. Lights and ignition switch are together on a different fuse.
So is the problem in the power side or the earth side?
Ideally I need the fault to happen while the car is on the drive so I can explore it.
In the meanwhile I can check as many earths as I can find but unless I find an obvious site of corrosion I do not know if I have fixed it.
The battery terminals appear total corrosion free.
I have invested in a Computer memory saver to plug in the cigarette lighter and some Torx bits so I will check the battery terminals and the connections on the battery tray.
I will update with any findings.
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I think I have solved my intermittent problem.
Since the last incident I have been preparing to go into battle but have not yet followed the earthing route.
I have studied the Haynes circuit diagrams and identified that main fuse 10 supplies both the ignition and light switches and have located it.
After a couple of weeks with no problems today it reappeared. I could not stop to explore it and had to use sons car. Fortunately the fault was still there on my return.
My simple test was, with the drivers door open and the sidelights on the warning buzzer should sound. Silence!! When I gently waggled the fuse the buzzer went on and off!!
The fuse is a half by three quarter inch rectangular box with a clear window in the top. On closer examination its insides looked different from its neighbours. It appeared NOT to have a link across its centre.
I replaced the fuse £4.50 and the waggling of it now no longer had any effect. All was working OK.
So what was going on? The fuse link appeared to be missing but the car would run OK. I did a 200 mile round trip yesterday with several stops and starts.
I put a meter on its external terminals and all seemed OK.
I prised off the Perspex cover for a closer look. There are two vertical legs poking up from the socket. The fuseable link is normally horizontal between them.
To my surprise this is what I discovered.
The fuse appears to have overheated. The elbows where the horizontal meets the vertical legs has softened. One elbow has broken and the whole horizontal link has fallen over. The broken end then appears to have reattached itself or is touching the vertical leg thus intermittently restoring the link.
I am feeling quite pleased and relieved but not fully relaxed about my findings.
The new question is what caused the fuse to melt in the first place? I guess I will probably never know.
I will try to contact the previous owner for any clues.
I guess it might just be possible that the car was traded in because it was unreliable.
Thanks to all for your help.
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Hope this might be of interest....bit long-winded but bear with me..
My last car was a mkII Mondeo and a right Friday afternoon car it was. On one occassion, after it had been parked up for a week, it refused to do anything - even the central locking was dead. Turned out the battery was flat, and wouldn't hold its charge. So a new battery. A few weeks later, I was pulling onto a roundabout and the engine died completely. Thank you to the other drivers around who managed to avoid driving into me and helped me to the side. A fuse check showed that one of these big fuses had blown. Local Ford dealer had some in stock so I bought 3 (at £4.50 each). Deep breath - insert first new fuse - everything OK.
Couple of weeks later, driving along an open road, engine dies again. In goes fuse number 2 and off I go agaqin. Two days later, whilst parking up at night, notice passenger footwell courtesy light not working. Check bulb - that's OK. Wiggle wiring loom and - 'cos it's dark - notice sparks from behind glove box. Dismantle as much of dashboard as seems prudent and notice sparking coming from the loom that feeds the fusebox under the glovebox. There is a tie wrap around this loom attached to a loose barbed plastic post which obviouly should be fitted somewhere but isn't. Just where the loom does a 90 degree bend under the top of the dashboard is an empty hole in the metalwork - just the right size to accomodate said plastic post. In the vicinity is a sharp metal edge, and two conductors in the loom with abraded insulation right against the metal. This proves to be the reason for the fuses blowing - and presumably when the insulation was just starting to wear through - the reason for the flat battery. Dismantled the connector to the fusebox and slid rubber sleeving over the damaged conductors - no room to use PVC tape to to constriction of space. Since then, no further problems. (Well, with the electrics. The rest of the car is another, very big, story.)
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Hope this might be of interest....bit long-winded but bear with me..
Thanks mike100.
I will obtain and carry a spare for said fuse and also a spare of the higher rated ones.
I will try a little loom flexing in case I have the same problem as you. Once I had identified which fuse was involved it did register the potential problem of a sudden dead engine that you experienced. With no lights working it would add an extra risk to the problem. Having just changed to an auto box, unlike kicking the clutch in when a cam belt went on a previous car, I would not instinctively slot into neutral to keep some momentum going.
I guess my other hope is a previous owner recalls a problem.
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