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Click noise, every 30 sec's, voltage drops .3v, next click voltage returns?

FlyNNN

NAXJA Forum User
Just in ... I'm hearing a click about every 30 seconds coming from the passenger side around the cowl. Battery voltage drops by about .3v and with the next click the voltage returns. Next click and voltage drops again. Doing this repeatedly. Caught it with my battery around 10v. Any longer and she would have been dead. Vehicle is sitting parked and not running. Any idea's? I have a 1990 XJ RENIX. I've had this vehicle since 92' and this a new one on me.
 
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I've disconnected the + battery lead from the post and am charging the battery. Its back up to 12.5v now. Will have to play the fuse by fuse battery draw game when I hook back up. Surely, after this vehicle being almost 30 years in service, someone has ran into this as well. Hopefully, that someone frequents this site.
 
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Sounds normal if your AC is on. The click is the AC clutch engaging.
 
Now for an update. I hooked up the battery again. It charged to 13.5v. And waited ... and waited. Its gone! Is this thing running Windows and needing a reboot? Looks like the CPU was acting up. I'm disconnecting the battery again and recharge it over night. We'll see how it behaves tomorrow.
 
It might be a relay energizing for some reason. My 96
has a relay center on that side, but I'm not sure about
the Renix. If you could isolate the relay when it clicks,
that would indicate the circuit giving trouble. Might even
be the relay itself....
 
It might be a relay energizing for some reason. My 96 has a relay center on that side, but I'm not sure about the Renix. If you could isolate the relay when it clicks, that would indicate the circuit giving trouble. Might even be the relay itself....
As I mentioned in post #4, the "click" noise was not coming from the area where the relays are located. It was coming from the cowl area. I don't know of any relays in that location. This was also perfectly timed for about every 30 seconds. Switch on, switch off, switch on ... some kind of timing circuit.

Todays update: all is well after the battery disconnect. Lesson learned so far on this ... you can't leave your jeep alone for more than 12 hrs. without checking up on it.
 
can it be the purge valve solenoid? it's under the hood but right next the the firewall, and it does click
Now you are talkin' ... didn't know of a "purge valve solenoid" and whether a RENIX even has one but I follow up on and do some research into this. Thanks for your input.

BTW, problem has not showed itself today.
 
can it be the purge valve solenoid? it's under the hood but right next the the firewall, and it does click
I found this post that would confirm that no "purge valve solenoid" exists in a RENIX.

The 87-90 are the only years with the EGR, and the EGR solenoid is only for the EGR, that part I am sure of. There is no purge solenoid on the Renix jeeps.

Come on Ecomike, where were you? Can't remember a post from 8 years ago? Sheesh! ... just kidding.
 
Do you have a power antenna? that's fairly close to the cowl, and I had one die such that it was trying to raise at an interval that may have been around 30 seconds...
 
Try leaving the headlights on to bring battery voltage down and see if the symptom returns. If you can recreate the symptom start pulling 1 fuse at a time, if symptom persists move on to next fuse until it stops. This could narrow it down quite a bit.

dub
 
It's back!!! 10 months after it first happened this issue has popped up again. Parked Friday evening and by Saturday morning the battery was dead. My regular charger was unable to recover the battery. I spent Sunday taking it to the shop where I bought it and their machine was able to recover it. Now that I have a working battery, I can continue with the trouble-shooting.

So a battery disconnect did not reset it this time and the problem is consistent now. The sound seems to be coming from the area around the base of the front passenger pillar. I hooked up a current meter and the draw is 4 amps when on. When off the draw drops down to around 100mA. This occurs in about 30 second cycles.

I'll have to start pulling fuses to find out which circuit the offender is on. If anyone has any ideas, please share.
 
I would bet it was caused by the low voltage on the battery -- something didn't like only 10 volts -- probably won't be able to repeat it with a full charged battery
 
Did you ever isolate the power antenna?
 
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