thought my car caught fire last night :(
Thread Starter
Drifting
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 1,785
Likes: 91
From: Leander TX
thought my car caught fire last night :(
Took the car for a nice drive with the wife and on the way back to the house we hear a POP sound from under the hood. My amp for the subs and my DVD player went dead too. I looked over at my volt meter and it was climbing fast. Before I knew it all my warning lights went off and it was climbing past 17volts!!! I put my flashers on and slowed down. As the RPMS went down the volts went down. The min I noticed this my wife looks at me and says she smelled smoke. At that moment I smelt it to. Pulled over and popped the hood and was relieve to see no fire. Started looking around and could find anything wrong so I limped the car home at 30 mphs the last 10 miles as I found that if I kept the RPM's below 1K it the volts were at 15.5volts. This is still high but doable to get us home in the middle of the night.
Turns out the reg in the alternator blew and was just pushing more and more electricity through the system as the speed increase. This was a first for me. I have alt fail on the car all before but they always stopped charging.
Just a good reminder why I keep a fire ext in the car and also a tip for those that may see this in the future. Scared the pooh out of me though as I just got this car rest mod restored and thought it was a blaze
Turns out the reg in the alternator blew and was just pushing more and more electricity through the system as the speed increase. This was a first for me. I have alt fail on the car all before but they always stopped charging.
Just a good reminder why I keep a fire ext in the car and also a tip for those that may see this in the future. Scared the pooh out of me though as I just got this car rest mod restored and thought it was a blaze
Team Owner
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 23,165
Likes: 117
From: San Antonio Texas
Fire is scary man! Glad it didn't light on you. Hope everything gets normal when you get the Alt. replaced.I ran over a plastic bag once right in front of a shopping mall. It stuck to the exhaust pipe and started smoking and stinking at the stoplight! It wasn't anything more than just a PIA to get it off, but it was scary for a few moments there. I had nothing to put out a fire but my own bladder, which I nearly emptied when I saw the stinking smoke!
Le Mans Master
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 5,043
Likes: 8
From: Tampa Florida
Glad to hear it ended well.
I had the same thing happen a few years back one night.....a defective alternator when ka-boom! After smelling smoke I pulled off the road and into a parking lot and popped the hood to inspect the damage only to find flames were shooting up. Grabbed my extinguisher but it was old/dead....good news though....turned out there was a bunch of cops (meeting for some type of "raid/sting" operation) in the same parking lot...a whole gaggle of them ran over and doused the flames with their extinguishers....took awhile to put it out completely since the fire was electrical in nature and the battery cable had to be disconnected before all the dousing ended.
I now keep a "full" extinguisher and cable cutters in the car.
I had the same thing happen a few years back one night.....a defective alternator when ka-boom! After smelling smoke I pulled off the road and into a parking lot and popped the hood to inspect the damage only to find flames were shooting up. Grabbed my extinguisher but it was old/dead....good news though....turned out there was a bunch of cops (meeting for some type of "raid/sting" operation) in the same parking lot...a whole gaggle of them ran over and doused the flames with their extinguishers....took awhile to put it out completely since the fire was electrical in nature and the battery cable had to be disconnected before all the dousing ended.
I now keep a "full" extinguisher and cable cutters in the car.
