HELP¡!¡! Installed winch, nearly burned my truck to the ground

I'm a professional mechanic & have a basic understanding of 12v electrical systems. But I'm a novice when it comes to winches & I'm not sure what's wrong.

Smittybilt XRC 9500

I installed the winch (brand new) with an ARB bumper on my truck about 4 months ago & finally had enough free time to wire up the solenoid tonight. However, when I connected the power & ground to the battery my engine bay turned into a smoke show.

I made longer 2 awg leads for the solenoid so I could install it under the hood. All wires are hydraulically crimped & wrapped in heat shrink. I also tapped into the 3 leads for the wired controller inside the solenoid & ran leads into the cab for in cab controls. (note: these wires are not currently wired to anything)

When I connected the wires to the battery it immediately sparked so hard that it began to melt the battery posts. The winch also immediately began spooling by itself. There was also smoke coming from the solenoid & winch, which I've identified as melting from each end of the small ground wire running from the solenoid to the winch.

I rechecked & all the wiring appears to be correct. I'm stumped as to what could be the issue. I'm also exhausted & calling it quits for the night until I can get some rest.

I also have a 500A battery isolator that will be wired between the battery & solenoid & controlled via an in cab switch to cut power to the winch when not in use, however it is not currently installed. I was running power straight to the battery to test the winch.

Something wired backwards? Faulty solenoid?

Wired as follows:

Right, yellow
Top, battery
Bottom, red
Left, black
(Battery neg & small solenoid lead to winch case)

 

The electrical guy I know @BartMaster1234

 

Oh my god it’s horrifying. Are you using four pin trailer wire? Nothing wrong with that, it’s just depending on the application it might not be rated high enough to carry current.

It sounds to me like something is shorting somewhere or you have something switched.

Also please please please get rid of those vampire splices. They are nothing but trouble.

 

Yeah, it's just some scrap trailer wiring. But it is just running to a in-out rocker switch in cab & is fused at 3A. In essence it's just an extension to the plug in controller. That's not the issue.

I'm 99% sure everything is wired correctly between the solenoid, battery & winch but I'm super tired & don't have a diagram in front of me at the moment.

My only guess is the solenoid is bad from the manufacturer. The positive wire sparked to the battery before even connecting the ground. Then when grounded it immediately began spooling & sparking & melting the small ground from the solenoid. My only guess is there's a bad internal ground.

I have a digital multimeter if there's a way to test the solenoid.

And yes, I know those taps suck. I was just using them to test my rocker switch before buttoning everything up. I'll solder & heat shrink them once everything is working correctly.

 

Set the multimeter to check for shorts. It should beep when one is found. I would check all the wires at this point. Also, what is the ohms reading of the winch?

 

The winch solenoid is grounded as soon as you connect it to the winch because the winch is grounded through contact with the bumper.

 

Couple of months ago I bought a Comeup Seal Gen 2 9.5 RS winch.

Brand new winch, simple wiring (nothing going to in-cab because I’ve got a wireless control) and similar thing happened to me - as soon as the battery was connected, the winch started autospooling in. It stopped thought everything was good, drove the truck on an errand and the winch spooled in while I was driving. Luckily I just had a zip tie on it and it snapped and didn’t have a shackle but the cone brake was heating up given the winch sucking down the synthetic line on the drum.

Long story short, Comeup sent me a new solenoid and the winch has worked flawlessly since but was initially disconcerting considering I just spent $1300 on a premium winch.....

Get a new solenoid.

 

Sounds like the solenoid is stuck closed. Might need to replace it, you can put a meter on it. It shouldn't have continuity until the 12V are applied

 

If the solenoid were just stuck closed, then the winch would just run. But it wouldn't be smoking. You've got a dead short between your positive and negative battery terminals somewhere to give you insulation melting levels of current. Double check all of your wiring against the wiring diagram, seems like you've got sent heavy gauge wires swapped somewhere.

 

Simple to test if your solenoid is shorted Meter set to Ohms .

This is where having the manufactures schematics is great for trouble shooting

Comes down to wired wrong !!

Damaged positive cable shorting

Either A shorted solenoid or Winch!!

 

I'm fairly certain the solenoid is stuck closed and/or otherwise defective. It was also tossed around for the past few months as I moved to a new home, so it may have been damaged.

Once I get home from work today I'm gonna recheck the wiring to make sure everything is correct & if so, test it with a multimeter & have it warrantied.

The only thing I can think of is maybe the new 2 awg leads are too big & the lugs are making contact with the solenoid. It was a tight fit to get them installed. It came with 4 awg leads but I made new leads to relocate the solenoid into the engine bay & used 2 awg cables.

 

In the last pic their is a bare spot on the blue wire. Maybe check all of them for bare spots

 

good eye, looks like there is exposed copper on the right side of the blue wire as well

 

Matter of fact I would disconnect all that and just try the solenoid normally

 

That's the ground wire that runs from the solenoid housing to the winch housing, & it's bare because it melted as soon as I connected the solenoid to the battery.

 

It is wired normally. Those other 3 wires are leads for an in cab switch, but they are not hooked up to anything right now.

 

But if the wires for the in cab switch are making contact with each other because of a bare spot or just something you missed. it could produce the symptoms your having.

I’m not trying to be mean but it looks like a cluster fuck and a fire waiting to happen to me.

 

They are all capped off inside the cabin & touching nothing.

 

Do you have a wiring diagram you could post? I'm having a hard time imagining your wiring from the description above.

 

There is a process to just jump a winch to the (a) battery. Your winch mfg can tell you how to do this. My mfg sent me to a online video, you can also do a web search how to jump a winch. This will take the truck (and its expensive electronics) out of the picture. If the winch runs nominally jumped out, then the problem is the wiring.