Hello everyone,
After a long career as a chartered electrical engineer in England I am now retired and a year ago I spent some of my pot of gold on a life long ambition to own a Jaguar limousine. I am six feet four inches tall and have always found difficulty in finding cars big enough to fit me. I found my dream in an immaculate 2004 4.2 LWB Super V8. Although she has done 100,000 miles she really is a beauty.
Since I bought her I have had battery trouble and I googled and then searched this forum trying to find solutions to my problems. Like others I had suffered drained batteries from a few hours up to 2 days from 'ignition key off'. I learned that big jaguars are battery hungry on shutdown.
I read of many instances of battery drain after shutdown and searches for electrical shorts and faulty circuits. As advised by others I bought a 'Sealey clip on' ammeter to check battery drain at the battery negative terminal after shutdown. To my horror a depressing reading of 8 amps indicated that my 90 AmpereHour battery would be flat in about 12 hours (90/8= 11.25). I checked again two hours later and still 7 amps.
Before panicking into pulling fuses and expensive garage repairs I decided to leave it until next morning and do more searching for advice.
Next morning -Joy, the amps had dropped to nearly zero- panic over! (I checked the ammeter was still good on my other vehicle). But why was my battery draining so fast? I found the answer by reading an excellent blog on the subject (Battery chargers and battery maintainers).
Turns out that after going on holiday for 2 months and leaving my battery on trickle charge in my garage, I had 'cooked' it. So it was permanently damaged and would then only hold a low charge.
I now have a battery charger which is designed to shutdown when the battery is full and then restarts when necessary.
I learned two key points.
1. Battery drain is heavy for a couple of hours after shutdown but then drops off quickly.
2. Long spells of permanent trickle charge ruins batteries.
So I hope this is useful to the forum and may help others.

 

Welcome to the forum,

Good story, you may want to share it over in the tech sections.

 

May sound a bit dim, but where would you advise in the tech sections to post it? Although I am XJ8, battery drain really applies across the board. Meanwhile, I am browsing and enjoying the wealth of experience and knowledge contained deep in the bowels of the forum.

 

Hello and welcome to jaguarforums.com. I know that you are anxious to get started and we are anxious to meet you and talk about your car. We have a baseline / criteria that must be met before full access can be granted. Please enjoy the forum and be patient once the baseline has been satisfied full access will be granted. Please continue to post and accept my welcome to the forum.

Please take a moment and read the information provided to you explaining the rules. Be patient and enjoy the site.

Also, should you have questions related to your vehicle please post it in the section for your model year (MY) car. This way you will reach all the members that are familiar with your MY car.

 

Great info there and welcome to the forum!

 

welcome aboard JF callepego great to have you here with us.

Congrats on the new car and thanks for sharing your story.

Just as a FYI when writing so much it might be an idea to put breaks in between the lines as it makes ofr easier reading, especially when its something of interest.

Hope you enjoy the site.....

I was down your neck of the woods last weekend at my sisters, my nephew as getting married and had a get together in Leek cricket club......man I had a sore head!

Loads going on, plenty of very friendly and helpful members as well as some excellent tech advice......all good!

In the meantime I've manually upgraded you to full forum access so you can better view the site