The enthusiast who drove up from Ohio for a tour of my training campus in Toronto had dual motives. He was interested in enrolling in my installer-training program and used the opportunity to get my read on a problem he was having with his system. He had a Ford Contour that he had bought as a former IASCA competition vehicle. It featured a Pioneer ODR Reference front end and processors feeding Phoenix Gold amplifiers, which in turn powered Image Dynamics subs and a set of compression horns in the front.
Overall, the installation was very competent and worthy of the trophies it was awarded in its day. You could tell the original owner was reasonably serious since he had excellent gear as the foundation and had gone "tweak" in selecting "wave guides" with the addition of a concealed center channel.
The enthusiast's key problem was with his charging system, which led to the huge amount of blame being tossed around as to what was the cause of a failed battery and alternator. I needed to confirm for him that his system was not the cause of the charging system failures, especially now that he had a fresh rebuild on the alternator and a new battery. I grabbed my faithful Fluke 85 digital multimeter and the current clamp and took some readings. Contrary to all the misinformation he was fed, his system was not drawing current when the car was turned off. The standby current draw was only a few milliamperes-not enough to drain a battery in less than two months.
I decided to check the charging system capacity using the live dynamic test method. At idle with the stereo performing at about half volume, the alternator would only deliver 12 volts, which is at least 0.6 volts short of barely adequate. When the engine was revved up to about 1,200 rpm, the charge became a reasonable 13.8 volts. In the live static test, the battery showed good results even though it had not had a really good charge since being installed two days earlier.
In this case, the charging system is only adequate for the stock features of the vehicle-a real engineering compromise designed to save money. The choice was to either play the stereo quietly if the car was idling in a parking lot or ensure that all vehicle accessories were turned off before cranking the system for no more than 10 minutes at a time. The ultimate cure would be to beef up the charging system, which was hard for the owner to understand since the alternator shop said that they had rebuilt the alternator to put out 200 amps. Yeah, right!
We closed the hood on the vehicle and went up to the admissions department to enroll the enthusiast in the course. As he went to leave, he discovered that his system was now very dead. I couldn't believe that the battery could die that quickly, which was confirmed when the car still started and ran fine. The old rule that "the last guy that touches it inherits the problem" was haunting me. It was now my fault, even though the installation had many hard years of competition. I broke out the Fluke once again and began tracing from the battery posts. The first object in the power path was the circuit breaker, installed no more than 12" from the battery in accordance with the rules. I pushed the reset button on the breaker, but there was no response. The Fluke revealed that the voltage was adequate at the input side of the breaker but absent at the output terminal. This clearly indicated that the breaker was faulty, having likely corroded over time. I figured that my pushing the reset button messed up the breaker. Then I saw the lever...
This particular breaker came in two styles-the lesser used thermally activated version and the much more common switchable type. Assuming it was switchable, and expecting the red button on the top to be the shutoff, I pressed it, but the expected switch lever did not pop out. This led me to think I was dealing with the thermal breaker version. A thermal breaker will self-activate when subjected to too much current, but it can't be manually activated. The red button in this case is the "reset," not "shutoff." I had pressed the button on the corroded breaker with no effect, and the stereo played on until I closed the hood to go inside. When the hood slammed down, the switch lever popped out, disconnecting the circuit and revealing the reset lever that had been stuck in place earlier.
As with many troubleshooting incidents, there is often more than one problem and they may not always be interrelated. There is a happy ending to the story-the enthusiast is now a student, and he is busy reworking his car with the instructor who built the Panasonic Stealth in the February 2006 issue of Car Audio & Electronics magazine, and I have a fresh object lesson to teach my students...