Ranger Mods

Freelancer1956 wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 11:57 pm

With respect to your car not starting after a month that might be asking too much of a modern vehicle
If its dead after 30 days, you've drawn about 3Ah per day(3 x 30 days = 90Ah) 3 Ah per day divide by 24 hrs = 125mA per hour. (jsut over the 20-50mA you'd expect in sleep mode

if your battery was already a bit out of condition and you might have started it just before locking(that rips some Ah out of it) it up then you could find yourself in that situation.

When my wife and I go away, we get one of our kids to drive the vehicle left at home at least once a week.
I wouldnt trust a modern vehicles battery to be good after a fortnight

Cliff

puma10 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 5:30 pm But then if you were to open one of the doors would it go through the cycle again? I l feel like it would because when I open the door of mine after it has been sitting for a while it will light up the dash and do all its squeaks

Freelancer1956 wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 1:25 pm Hi all
In a separate post I received incorrect advice from an auto-electrician that my Scangaueg2 was causing my Ranger to constantly wake up and draw down 3 amps continuously. This post is to clarify and hopefully get some feedback from others who may be able to test their own system.

I constructed a shunted Ammeter and connected it in series from the negative terminal of my battery to the body Ground wire connection.

the hand drawn graph below is approximate but explains what is happening.

When the Ranger(Px2 2016) is first locked / unlocked the draw across the battery is about 7A, drops down inside of 30 seconds to 5A and then about 3 Amps. This would be do to CANbus operation and that exterior and interior lights are auto switched on.
Canbus battery drain 2.jpg

THEN the CANbus systems starts to go to "sleep" - pretty much within 10 or 20 seconds it drops to about 2A then not long after drops to 1A and then slowly drops off to under 0.4A.
THEN the CANbus suddenly wakes up by itself. The current draw jumps back up to about 3A(2.9A) then that same cycle repeats itself never-ending until the vehicle is unlocked and started.

To do the above you basically have to keep your eyes in the ammter and take readings continuously for at least 2 x 5 minute cycles.

Doing some rough estimates of "time vs current" of the area under the curve in the above graph, the current being drawn would be at least 0.8A on average across each 5 minute cycle. Multiply that 0.8Ah x say 23 hours a day of the vehicle not being used then that equals about 18Ah or one quarter the capacity of the 80Ah battery.

In other words if the car was not started for 5 days (5x18=90Ah) the battery would be fully flat. I have never had that problem because even when camping and parked up I'll idle the car for 10 or 15 minutes each day to put a surface charge back across the battery. But it is always depleted each morning to under 12.4V, sometimes as low as 12.1V. The battery must be being life shortened due to 15-20Ah of deep cycling draw per day.

So many other posts over the years have reported Ranger reduced battery life with inconclusive reasons.

So I would be very interested to hear from any others who have Ammeter testing capabilities (across that ground wire connection) to see if they see the same. ie 3A jump up every 5 minutes dropping down to floor of about 370mA (the latter is probably still too high)

My vehicle goes in for a service at Ford on Monday and I'll be asking their auto-electrician to have a look at the graph. I hold no hope though that they will be able to assist but I would dearly like Ford to tell me what a "normal" CANbus current draw curve should look like.

Cliff

Ammeter screen.jpg
Ammeter board.jpg