I went out on the first off-road run on my '08 SP500 EFI, and had some more problems. First, my son hit turned the lights on and the quad just shut down and lost power to everything. Then, it was doing it more frequently from just riding. I immediately thought, after reading through several posts here, that my ecu is going out. I went to the fuse box and found my 20 amp main fuse is somewhat corroded and loose. I am hoping this is the problem and was wondering if it is common or not. I also lost my high beam headlight while riding. I was able to find the problem, which was the ground wire broke off inside the connector. There is no room to splice the wire back together so I just grounded it to the frame. Is there any consequence to leaving a disconnected ground wire? I can't tell where it goes from the headlight but I assume that it isn't tied into something else since everything is working now. It seems I am having my share of electrical problems especially since There are only have 510 miles on my quad. Thanks for your time and help!

 

hope, you get it fixed, all brown wires on polaris are grounds, if it gives you more trouble you might splice that wire into another ground might get some electrical cleaner and some di-electric grease for the fuse box and any other bad connections, was this machine run in salt water? that would explain the corrossion

 

Its been here in Michigan so it has seen salt from plowing, but not near saltwater. The fuse was corroded and looked pretty bad just on one side of it. What I'm worried about is how loose a few of the wires are. ESP the ones going into my main 20 amp fuse. It is not easy getting to them to correct it. As far as the ground wire, I spliced the broken one and ran it straight to the frame, but the bottom half is still floating around in the wiring somewhere. I am not very electrically inclined so I just want to know if it will hurt anything to leave it down there. I think that some things have a shared ground and I don't know if the headlight is or not. I don't notice anything else malfunctioning, but I haven't ridden it far since then. Thanks for the tips.

 

All brown wires terminate to frame ground. Doesn't matter if you tie into any other brown wire.
Look on left side of frame and you will see the battery ground along with several other smaller ground wires screwed into the frame. A loose ground wire won't hurt anything EXCEPT if it was to touch any power wire. OPT

 

Yes I knew from my very limited electrical experience along with reading many posts that the brown wire was a ground and instead of fishing the broken wire out of the abyss of wires, I just tied it into the frame. It is running straight off the headlight to the frame. I was asking about the rest of the wire that hopefully just leads to another spot on the frame somewhere. As long as the headlight doesn't share a ground wire with something else, it won't hurt to just leave it broken off somewhere further down the wiring, right?

 

As long as everything is working correctly I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. You should be fine. Leaving the ground wire hanging will hurt nothing.

 

Ok thanks guys. Just wanted to be sure.