battery dies when key is off

[ray]

i have a 2006 polaris ranger xp 700. the battery keeps dieing on me when the key is turnd off .. can some one please help me get back on the trail for this weekend thanks evey body

[azar5613]

You should check your battery to see if it can hold a charge... could be bad. You can try to recondition it as well if you have access to a charger with that option. Have you tried a different battery in it's spot?

[ELK_HUN10]

Disconnect a terminal from the battery and measure the voltage of the battery using a digital voltmeter. An analog meter is not accurate enough.

Following is a table you can use to determine the state of charge of a battery.
A digital voltmeter is needed to do this test, an analog voltmeter is not accurate enough.
You should check the battery after it has not been used for 10 hours. A surface charge may exist and give false readings. Or you can turn on your lights for 5 minutes to remove any surface charge without any charging system running.

Battery State of Charge Voltage Table
Percent of Full Charge 12 Volt DC System
100% 12.7 volts
90% 12.6
80% 12.5
70% 12.3
60% 12.2
50% 12.1
40% 12.0
30% 11.8
20% 11.7
10% 11.6
0 &lt<=11.6

Usually if a battery is no good, if it shows a full charge immediately after you shut it off, it will show a charge of about 8-10 volts 12 hours later. Just sitting there with a cable disconnected, that is a bad battery.
If you do have a short somewhere. You can use an amp meter to trace it down. Try checking each one of the fused circuits. With the key off you should not have any current flow. The amp meter has to be hooked in series. Check the battery cable first to make sure something is drawing down the battery. Take one cable off, put one terminal on the cable and put the other terminal of the ammeter to the battery terminal that the cable was just on. There should be not current flow. If there is, it is a tedious process to find the short but it is possible. Just check each circuit until you find one that has a current flow.

Sorry about the red highlighted word battery. I did a search and copy pasted the result and the word battery was always in red.

[Russ Chastain]

Look at the terminal block next to the battery (under the hood) where the wires are attached. Look at the terminal that the red battery cable is attached to, and see what other wires are connected to it. Those are for stuff that always receives power, even when the key is off.

[brmccolley]

Thanks for that chart with the percentage of battery charge. I haven't seen that before and it will be quite handy. I was also wondering if you thought that it would be possible to track down a short by disconnecting the positive and then checking on the ohm scale on the small bar that the positive cable connects to against the negative cable or solid ground. I've been seeing a couple "short" related questions and I wasn't sure if this approach would work to track down where a positive wire is always grounded, thus draining the battery when the key/switch is not turned on.

Also, I noticed in Azar5613 inventory runs a yellow top battery. Is there any special considerations in such a conversion? Especially mounting location if the stock size battery is located under the hood. Is a yellow top auto battery preferred over a dual stock size battery installation for running auxillary components (winch/lights)?

[ELK_HUN10]

A short by definition is a short to ground, an open is a broken connection. Shorts are hard to find if the cirucit they are on does not carry enough current to trip a circuit breaker or blow a fuse. An ohmmeter works good to chase down a short. The battery should be disconected so as to not ruin the ohm meter. A schematic drawing of the elctrical system is a big help in narrowing down the problem. One place is fuse blocks or circuit breakers. If the fuse is good or the circuit breaker is not tripped, it does not matter which side of the fuse circuit you measure from. Put a lead on a good ground and start touching different circuits if it is a short, one of them will show a short to ground and you have narrowed down the search to the items on that fuses circuit. After that you need to disconnect a wire at one end and check for a short between the wire and ground, do the same for all componets on the circuit. If you get a negative reading, turn the test leads around. Start at he highest ohm reading and work down untill you get a good short reading. Most of the time that is the lowest reading on the ohm meter. Except for capacitors, you should not run into any voltage. Once a circuit is identifed as a short, often a visual inspection will show wherre the short is occuring. Look for a bare wire that should have insulation on it or wires that have rubbed against a metal object that is grounded. Tail lights and switching circuits can become grounded due to vibration while running the machine. Some shorts only occur while the machine is running and the vibration or road bumps cause them to short out. These are very difficult to find and you usually don't find them until some thing gets melted. If you can identify the circuit the short is on, you have done most of the work but sometimes even that is not good enough to find the short. An O-scope can be used if you know what the dispalyed pattern on the screen should look like but usually only a technition that has been trained on that machine and circuit can use that. The hardest short of all to find is when the machine is not grounded correctly. That is best checked by running a wire from the motor to the battery ground. If the problem goes away when you do that you have a ground problem. After four years as a technition on a classified piece of equiptment, I never did develope a good trouble shooting technique for finding grounding problems and just ran another wire from the frame to an metal object that I knew was grounded. Most of the shorts I found were due to insulation being rubbed off a wire and causing a short. Electronic componets can short out internally but when they do that they do not work any more and are easy to find and replace. I always hate short problems but with a lot of time and perseverance you can troubleshoot and find them. The worst prolems to find is when you have more than one short. Pickups with trailer hitches, battery isolators and many after factory add ons are good candidates for multiple shorts. With time though they can all be found and fixed.

[brmccolley]

I've seen a couple posts that I thought the multimeter ohm check would be a good technique to trace the short, but I'm no EE so I didn't know how to explain al of the possible complications. Thanks again,

[Russ Chastain]

I just stumbled across a thing in my service manual for current draws with the key off.

Disconnect the - battery cable from the batt, but leave the + connected. Place one lead of an ammeter on the - battery terminal and the other lead on the disconnected - cable. You should read no more than 0.1 DCA (10 mA).

If the draw is more than that, disconnect loads one at a time until you find the culprit. Then check that component and the wiring for it for partial shorts to ground to eliminate the draw.

[jwolfe60]

I have a 99 ranger that brand new battery dies overnight. There is a weird clicking noise every 8 seconds even with the key off, and the headlights dim every 8 seconds if they are on as well.

[ELK_HUN10]

Comment duplicated, see next comment.