I am a new owner to these psd's but I think this is a general electrical question. I'm driving in the city, I reach over and unplug my cell phone cord from the cig lighter plug. At the same moment truck dies on the spot, I go Hmmmm. A week later I have my skidoo trailer hooked up, going down my back alley and turn on my lights to see if they are all working, guess what... truck dies at the same time I pull the switch out. Now I know something is haywire but if this sounds familiar to anyone and I can get a place to start my search for the problem, It will be appreciated. thanks for any leads ahead of time.

Ed

 

Maybe their is a bad ground somewhere , and somehow it is killing the truck ??? I would take it to the dealer if you havent allready, and go on a test drive with the mechanic and show him the issue.........

 

I guess there could be a bad ground but I would think it is a chassis ground. In the electrical field we call these bonding straps. You will find them in several places under the hood. They are thin, flat braided straps that connect all the metal parts of the chassis to each other.

It sounds to me like you are suffering from a voltage spike. When you unplug the charger or turn on the lights, there is an arc and that arc generates a very high voltage. It sounds like this arc is getting back to your computer.

There is probably electrical noise suppression in the computer but you can't fix that without a new computer. The only thing I can think of is to check if there is a capacitor on the alternator. This capacitor will absorb noise in the system. Check with your dealer about this capacitor or try to find it yourself. It would be on or near the alternator and is a small silver colored canister about 1/2 the size of your thumb.

I'm not that familiar with what all Ford is doing these days for noise suppression but that is where your problem is I'm pretty sure