Long story short. Last night I pulled the grounds off of the batteries to clean them. This in hopes of fixing the torque converter from locking and un locking at around 48mph, steady throttle. The old APPS/TPS troubles, also reset the APPS/TPS after I hooked them back up.
The truck is a 99 with 82k miles, original batteries.
Anyway truck ran fine. Pulled it back in the garage.
Came home this afternoon. Discovered that both batteries were dead.
I put a couple of new batteries in. Fired it up and noticed with my volt gauge that they were not charging. 11.8 volts and falling. Turned the truck off. Felt of the two small red wires coming off of the left batttery positive side. One was hot,hot,hot. Checked the terminals for the grid heaters at the intake. One terminal was also burning hot. Unhooked that cable from the grid heater. Fired truck back up, now it is charging like normal.
Also one of the grid heater relays was super hot.
So my guess is that the relay for that side has gone bad.
I just don't understand why it did this after I had just cleaned the ground cable.
Thanks for any ideas.........

 

That's a new one.

I would just pull the relay and see if it quits. The relays are all the same so you can switch it with your headlight relay and see if they stay on. I think there is a trailer relay that is not used very offten unless you tow.

BTW the ground connections you need to clean up are the ones that go from the battery to the fender, and from the ECM (passenger side firewall) to the firewall, not the battery cable grounds.

 

Thanks. Yes I cleaned those grounds also.
I wonder where that trailer relay is located.
Also I beleive I read that you can replace these with a older style ford starter relay?

 

The grid relay is not interchangable with any of the other relays in the PDC or elsewhere on the Dodge. The one you are looking at should be the one located under the left side battery. They are a dual solenoid system and can be replaced with two universal solenoids available from just about any autoparts store.

If just one side is bad, you can continue to use the other side and simply replace the bad side with a universal solenoid.

Once you look at them you will see they are pretty simple, a hot wire from the battery, power lead to grid heater, and two relay trigger wires on each individual solenoid.

 

Yea, what he said! lol

 

put a picture up