hornsfan10609
Certified Mazda Tech
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- 2003.5 Mazdaspeed Protege x2
Plus these cars are known to have corroded battery cables that cause many different electrical problems.
when you jumped it, did you use an aligator clip? With sharp teeth?
I would thinkg that 11.2v is enought to actuate the solenoid. Clean everything with 150 grit sand paper and make it shine.
Put your volt meter on the solenoid spade if you can while you crank it. There may still be a large voltage drop between your the connector and the starter which goes away with an aligator clip.
I've seen 220V industrial plugs burn up because a poor wire connection inside, ie high resistance. By your theory it should have never done so, so why is that? For one, Voltage and current are hardly constant; rather power is not constant.
Use ohms law in the power version where P = IR^2 If current remains constant but resistance goes up, the power dissipated increases exponentially.
The alternator is a current source not a fixed voltage supply. Take a wire normally running at 1ohm resistance and take it to, I dunno, 10 ohms resistance from corrosion. If the alternator is trying to put 10 amps into the battery, the good wire is only dissipating 10 watts where as the 10 ohm one is dissipating 1000 watts.
Its been years since I've thought about this stuff so correct me if I'm wrong.
Not sure if this matters or not at this point but my replacement alternator had a big red sticker on it that said NOT to test the alt while off the vehicle. I get voltage readout from the ecu via obdII connection on the laptop verified by the volt readout from the radar detector plugged into cig lighter & also by testing different points in the wiring as stated above. Yes, radar detector has a voltage readout for some reason.Got the new alternator in, things were looking good. (The alternator was tested at a parts place and failed miserably and sounded pretty bad doing it. It was done).
Not sure if this matters or not at this point but my replacement alternator had a big red sticker on it that said NOT to test the alt while off the vehicle. I get voltage readout from the ecu via obdII connection on the laptop verified by the volt readout from the radar detector plugged into cig lighter & also by testing different points in the wiring as stated above. Yes, radar detector has a voltage readout for some reason.