08-08-2010, 02:25 PM
Here's a warning to anyone not living in the Sahara.
While diagnosing my failed water pump I was running thru the cooling system DIY with the relay distribution box. I left the cover off as it's under the hood, seems reasonable. Well, after over a month of sun it finally rained. Nice and refreshing, good for the forest fire problems. Go to my garage and I hear this Whirrrr and notice my rad fan is running in the car but I know there are NO relays in the slots! Yikes. When it rains the water runs off your windshield, over the plastic cover by your wiper and straight into the relay box! Now there's a stupid design.
So I charge my battery, hit the relay box with lots of contact cleaner and compressed air and pray.
I get up this morning and visit my garage again and now I hear thimp, thump, thimp, thump. I look at my car and both the headlights are randomly going up and down and a pump is running; for how many hour I don't know but I hooked up the charger it's pinned at 10 amps.
I have pulled all the relays and raised the distribution box out of it's hole. Hopefully becasue it's fresh water the sun will drive the moisture out and it will be ok. I don't want to crack that baby open as I fear putting it back together might cause more problems with all the plates inside. I do worry that, even though it was fresh water, there will be residue. After all, pure water doesn't conduct well so that means there were enough contaminants in the rain to allow 12V to flow and that's a very low potential which requires a good conduction path. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif[/img]
While diagnosing my failed water pump I was running thru the cooling system DIY with the relay distribution box. I left the cover off as it's under the hood, seems reasonable. Well, after over a month of sun it finally rained. Nice and refreshing, good for the forest fire problems. Go to my garage and I hear this Whirrrr and notice my rad fan is running in the car but I know there are NO relays in the slots! Yikes. When it rains the water runs off your windshield, over the plastic cover by your wiper and straight into the relay box! Now there's a stupid design.
So I charge my battery, hit the relay box with lots of contact cleaner and compressed air and pray.
I get up this morning and visit my garage again and now I hear thimp, thump, thimp, thump. I look at my car and both the headlights are randomly going up and down and a pump is running; for how many hour I don't know but I hooked up the charger it's pinned at 10 amps.
I have pulled all the relays and raised the distribution box out of it's hole. Hopefully becasue it's fresh water the sun will drive the moisture out and it will be ok. I don't want to crack that baby open as I fear putting it back together might cause more problems with all the plates inside. I do worry that, even though it was fresh water, there will be residue. After all, pure water doesn't conduct well so that means there were enough contaminants in the rain to allow 12V to flow and that's a very low potential which requires a good conduction path. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif[/img]
