Coming home tonight was cruising down the highway, then out of no where check gauges light comes on voltage gauge is bottomed out and lights are dim. Pull over and make sure there are no pending under hood fires (something smelled hot) quick glance things seem ok home is like 5 more minutes so i carry on. Get home shut down the truck and start probing around under the hood. Jon was with, and was looking with me and he hit the intake horn and its HOT! The grid heater was on and would not shut off, had to pull the battery connections. They were on continuously for about 15 minutes which i suspect caused the voltage to drop enough to put on the check gauges light. Was not good, smoke coming out and some very rubbery power cables.

Anyone ever had or heard of this before?

 

Seems like it could be a few things , sensor bad , telling the system that it is cold , relay - points stuck together - keeping heater on .
You need backtrack the system wiring that controls the grid heaters , looking for any signal that should not be there , turning on heaters when it warm enough for them not to come on .

 

yep happened to me, check gauges came on I fiqured my alt bit the dust, I confirmed low voltage by my indash gauge and with the Edge J/A. I continued on home and shut the truck off the next day I went to go trouble shoot and the batterys were stone cold dead, not a volt to be found anywhere. I found both my grid relays were STUCK on, my truck always used to cycle the grids on EVERY hot start (190*F) when it was cold outside (anything below 10*C). I tried a new IAT sensor with no change. What I did was replace the grid relays with a set of ford tempo starter relays and wired them to a push button. My truck sees a garage every night, and when the dash "wait to start" light comes on I push the grid button, till the light goes out.
The grids do stick, I've seen a few posts about it in the past, most times its because poeple post that they changed alt and batteries and the batteries keep going dead.

 

here is a good thread to read, I learned some stuff too.

https://www.dieseltruckresource.com/...+starter+relay

 

Thanks for the input and thanks for the link(s) Nick

I'm just gonna unhook them today and see if my charging system is in tact, and then start problem solving Friday when i have all day to rip into it.

Thanks again

 

me too, mine stuck on in my 96 a few years ago. i changed the relay on the inner fender and they still did it so i just leave them un-hooked.

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about grids> http://dodgeram.org/tech/dsl/trouble...niford_htr.htm

 

Printed it it out earlier today, it was in a link Nick posted.

Well i just unhooked the power to the relays today didn't have time to rip into it. Charging system is ok, checked continuity through the relays with the truck off they are stuck (0 resistance) So hopefully that is the only thing I will have to replace, I'll take it apart Friday and do some more tests, make sure its not getting the signal voltage to close them when its not suppose to.