Jon Kraus wrote:
The alternator and battery are working correctly. This seems to be a
short or a ground issue somewhere.

Thanks!!

JK

MC wrote:

Jon Kraus wrote:

I absolutely HATE electrical issues, and we seem to have another one.
My partner flew from Indianapolis to Dallas (via Oklahoma City) and
back over the weekend. Everything was fine on the way there. On the
way back he started having avionics probems. It started with the VOR
needles twitching and then the 430, fuel totalizer and finally the
comms went inop. He noticed that the landing light would not stay on,
like there was a short somewhere. We had an issue with the landing
light wire shorting out before causing the breaker to not reset. This
was fixed last year.
He was able to make it back to Indianapolis with no issues as long as
he went 2600 rpm and 25 MP. This power MP setting is seems did not
cause the issue to occur. When he throttled back to say 2400 squared
the problem manifested itself again.

So I guess my questions are these:
Could a short circuit in the Landing Light circuit cause anything
that I described?
Has anyone here had an issue like this before? And last but certainly
not least do you have any suggestions?



Maybe a combination of problems.
Heavy electrical load,
+
Alternator not producing enough power. (slipping belt, stuffed
alternator, stuffed regulator),
+
Reduced battery capacity. (age)

My $0.02 is that the problem is somewhere in the alternator/belt region.

The post stated that the problem went away when high engine RPM
was used, meaning that the alternator/regulator/battery
combination was not producing enough energy to satisfy the load
at the lower RPMs.

I'm not yet convinced that a ground problem would be overcome
by higher RPMs. (unless it's some wierd resonance effect g)

Hmm, another though has just occured to me.., what if the
battery has a shorted cell ?
That scenario would cause low voltage at the battery and the
regulator will try to send a *lot* of current into the battery
in an effort to get it back to nominal.