As you may have seen, It's been rather wet the last few days here in the West country, So you can imagine I was not best pleased at the thought that my car might be about to die when I was stuck in traffic on a awefull road in bristol, in terrible weather. More than once on my way the radio cut out completely, all the lights went out like it had no power to it and the last time it did this I ended up on the side of the M26 with no alternator or Leccy.

On my lunch break, after trying to dry out the foot well on the passenger side, I checked the battery and had a reassuring 12.65 volts, and before setting off atthe end of the day I checked again and with the engine running, and got about 14.5 so the battery is charging.

Is there anything else I should be checking because I really don't want to break down on my way to work as it's usually a solid queue the whole way.

Other things I've considered are I had lights on, and heater and fan on full, and I'm not sure but I belive at least one of the times was whilst I was indicating. Also, the battery was slightly wet when I checked the voltage the first time. The only other thing could be the terrible condition of the road, but I doubt that would take three weeks to do something.

On my way home, with the heater much lower, and no wipers, but still with lights, I had no problems.

wet in the radio or a bad wiring connection at the back of the radio?
look at the obvious ones first!

quote:

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Originally posted by blakep82
wet in the radio or a bad wiring connection at the back of the radio?
look at the obvious ones first!

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Wet passenger footwell should be setting off alarm bells! Water is getting in somewhere and possible shorting out the radio

Check fan belt, it may be slipping, no drive = no power
Check fuse box, if that's wet inside or underneath where the wires go in.
Check that the scuttles not leaking water into the electrics under the dash
Buy a boat weathers going to get worse

What car is it?
For it to cut out completly yet require no changing of fuses means the water is causing a board to malfunction but not at the power supply end of things.

Water in the footwell is always bad.

You may be getting black wire corrosion it happens if the copper at the end of the wires gets wet and dries

Check your earths are clean and use copper slip on them to prevent further corrosion. A wet battery is irrelevant will make no difference

Try and stop the water getting anywhere near the fuse box, it won’t short but will deteriorate rapidly if not kept dry, the fuses too and corrode so are worth checking their condition

Is it Italian ?

As others have said, what car do you have? It's not unknown for water to get into fuse boxes causing intermittant problems

If you are stationary (or mostly stationary) with the engine idling with wipers, demister, heated rear window, headlights, etc. on the battery could be discharging.

Pull the radio out and stick it in your airing cupboard for a few days!

It would to know what car model, a lot of cars these days have the radio, wipers and just about any other non-engine function controlled by the BCU, glitches in BCU controlled functions aren't uncommon -- wipers or flashers or interior lights suddenly switching on, electric windows or sun roofs suddenly openning..

It's a h plate eunos roadster, it's that it did it a couple of times in one journey but hasn't before (Bar the time it died completely 5 months ago) or since and I can't get it to do it again that bothers me.

Wiring all seems fine as far as I can check. And I checked the fuses though I'd have though if it was fuses it would have just gone off, not cut out and come back again.