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drained battery, wiring harness? update
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Posted by bg (more from bg) on Thu, 31 May 2001 09:46:10 Share Post by Email
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I ended up speaking with the dealer's tech yesterday, armed with all the info you guys supplied me with. Based on my conversation with him, I would speculate that one of two things happened at the dealership.

...

1. (The give-them-the-benefit-of-the-doubt scenario)

The information that I told the person that I spoke to when dropping off the car never made it to the tech. He was operating under the assumption that this was a simple dead battery case, when presumably I had come out to the car and found the battery was dead. He jump started the car, the battery seemed to hold its charge, and so he went looking for things that could have caused the battery to be drained while the car was off. He eventually either really found a problem with the wiring harness in the trunk or made the problem up.

2. (The they-were-trying-to-rip-me-off-all-along scenario)

The tech heard the story about the battery draining while driving, but upon jumping the car the battery appeared to hold its charge. He didn't see anything wrong, so he went looking for problems. He either found a legitimate problem with the trunk light wiring harness, or he made that up so they would have something to fix. Either way this wasn't the solution to my problem, so this would be fraud.

...

When I questioned how the trunk light could be overpowering the alternator output, he agreed that it couldn't be but he said the he didn't know the battery was draining while driving. I asked him if he had checked the alternator output and he said he had with normal results. Since I didn't trust him after they tried to charge be almost $400 to fix something that either isn't a problem or is not the problem at hand, I didn't really trust him to continue to look for the real problem, so I told him I would pick up the car. I paid $37.50 for his diagnostics, and went with someone following me home to pick up the car.

I didn't know if it would make it or not, but the mechanic claimed he could find nothing wrong and that the car held it charge fine. I made it about 20-30 mi at ~ 2000 rpm avg. without incident. The meter bounced between 13.7 and 13.9 which is normal in my experience for my car. After braking for a turn, the battery light came on and I dropped to 12.something, once the road opened up again I floored it for a minute and this popped the meter back up to normal. It dropped down again several miles later, once again revving got it back to normal for a bit. I drove at ~ 2500 rpms for some time on the highway, but then that ceased working, and so I started driving faster than my escort would like. At ~ 3000 rpms I lasted many more miles, but eventually that stopped being enough, I dropped the car into 3rd (its an auto), dropped my speed down to 65 mph and ran at ~3500 rpms for many miles - this worked for a while, but eventually this wasn't even enough so I brought my rpms up to ~4000 for the remainder of the drive. My meter hovered around 12, but was creeping down by a tenth about every five minutes. Anyway, eventually I made it with ~ 11. left as I rolled into my driveway.

What do you guys think? I suspect its the brushes, but does that explain why giving it a rest for a few days would get another 20 or 30 problem free miles out of it? And what about the tech reporting that the alternator tested fine - of course he might not have really done that, but assuming that he did for a moment- could the alternator test fine when first started cold, but after some time cease producing enough power?

Thanks to everyone who responded to my first post, I would not be able own a SAAB without you guys. When I first heard the dealers story and I half believed it, I was going to sell my car, because it would be so outrageous if any little electric thing that goes wrong in the car- and of all places in the trunk- could stop my engine from running and leave me stranded on the side of the road. If its the alternator I don't feel so bad- all cars have them and on all cars they wear out - that's a fair repair. However, if my car leaves us stranded one more time my girlfriend will kill me, then make me sell the car. Whatever this is I need to conclusively diagnose and fix, along with anything else that goes wrong at about this point in a Saabs life (1990 9000CD 2.0L turbo 119K).

Thanks again.
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