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What would cause my 2014 F350 Platinum to catch on fire after it had been parked for close to 11 hours? Not occupied, not running. It was such an intense fire it was a total loss.
Insurance has no answers yet. It has been about 6 days since it happened.
Lightening strike. Electrical short. Kids with matches. Spontaneous truck combustion, which is similar to spontaneous human combustion, but there aren't any sox with feet in them.
Any fire requires accelerant and ignition. Outside of external influence (arson/accident by human interference), you're most likely looking at the electrical igniting the fuel. Given the timeframe of 11 hours, heat issues like DPF temps and grass fires from the exhaust are less likely. Best bet is an electrical short, or maybe even a varmint chewing on the wires. Not sure where you're from, but here it is getting cooler in the evenings and rats are looking for a bed.
reverse current over heating of the alternator diodes. diodes catch fire, fire spreads to coating on alternator wires, from there spreads .
alternator diodes have high resistance in one direction and very low resistance in the other. as the wear out, the high resistance side becomes conductive. current flows from battery back thru the alternator, over heats after a few hours.
this is actually a pretty common problem with parked vehicles that are not running.
what can be done to prevent....an additional high current diode in series....rely to disconnect battery when key off (clock goes hay wire and learned values are loss), manual switch to engag disengage battery.
these diodes are about 75 cents per amp. this one is 400 amps and cost 285 bucks. size depends on size of your alternator.
they come in different mounting configs.
there's a voltage drop costs to use these....voltage drop is anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 volt.
it disconnects the batter my when the voltage gets too low …..voltage will definitely drop to low if the alternator internally shirts out.
not sure what will happen on a cold day if glow plugs kick in and your trying to start the motor …but it’s on Amazon so if it’s counter productive it can be returned.
We just went through something similar on a 2011 F350. Shop boss was leaving the parking lot and noticed the tail lights on in one of the trucks. He called to have someone turn them off. They went out and found the switch off, they noticed smoke coming from the engine compartment and when they raised the hood it was in flames. They got the fire out and it looked like wiring harness from pcm and pcm were burned severely.
We repaired the truck as the insurance company paid the claim. After that a couple of months later the truck became a runaway and we found the engine crankcase full of diesel fuel. We determined that two injectors on the fire side were leaking. That caused the engine to fill with diesel, enter the pcv separator and be sucked into the engine causing the runaway. it was a mess and we still aren't sure of engine damage from diluted oil.
Anyway, if the fire was determined to come from the right side engine compartment it could have been pcm or alternator. There's not much else around there that could have started a fire.
