Land Rover Repair: Not Charging, obd ii, cross country skiing

Question
John,

Hey there from Nova Scotia...how are ya boy?  The saga of the 95 Disco I continues, and my wife is starting to breath heavily down my neck.  If you recall, I was having a charging issue...replaced alt. and it ran for 2 weeks and died, replaced batt ran for two weeks and died.  You recommended checking the serp. belt routing...all appears fine and it doesn't really seem loose.  I charged the battery overnight, put it in the car and she started right up.  Put a full load on it (heater, radio, lights etc) with no probs.  The battery light was on for a couple of minutes but went out.  I took it for a drive and noticed: anti-lock light did not extinguish, service engine light on, speedo never registered anything.  I suspected that something was slowly draining the battery as it just sat in the driveway.  I checked the batt. output with the car off to try to see if anything was drawing power and it registered .02 mA, suggesting to me anyway that was not the culprit.   I pulled a bunch of fuses (the ones suggested by the owners manual) and they were all fine.  Do you think the speedo, service engine and the anti-lock light are related to the problem?  Also, the local garage says they can't check my codes for the service engine light, but a friend of mine has a OBD-II (is that right) reader...will it work for our car?  Where do you plug it in?

Thanks a ton for the help and all you do for all of us!

wes

Answer
Hi Wes!  How's the weather treating you over there? Not too cold for you?

I was at the Canadian Eastern Championships (cross country skiing) and I met a club from Cape Breton. Nice lads. Did well too!

On to your Disco...can't do much for the wife.  My wife sneers at the Disco too!  God love 'em.

You know, it could be your ignition switch.  Normally, its the ignition switch that triggers a test sequence.  You'd have to probe the wires to see if it truly switches off.

Service engine light is an emissions reminder.  www.discoweb.org has a great tech page on resetting this emissions reminder.

Our '95 Disco's are OBD rated and equiped.  The new models are all OBD-II equiped.  These vehicles have a serial connector either under the drivers seat OR a port is located under the dash below the steering wheel.  

The OBD-II reader won't work on our Disco.  we do have an OBD display under the passenger seat.  Red readout.  Switch ignition to position II and then look under seat fore OBD display.  

Best of luck,

JohnMc

NB: Good Olympic games, eh?  Curling teams did very well.
bye from Quebec.