Urgent battery assistance please

Yesterdays fiddling around seems to have solved the problem. Started fine about 10 times yesterday. I checked all the connections around the battery and in the electronics under the driver's seat. Battery is holding 12.8V and when engine is running is showing 14.3V.

I have no idea what has changed: 2 weeks of hit and miss starts and then back to normal. Might be an earthing problem as the problem is (hopefully, was) more prevalent when engine is warm. For the moment I will put it down to Land Rover gremlins and just keep worrying about it. If it comes back I will pay closer attention to earthing wires.

Thanks for the help.

By the way, Fraser is awesome! This place will eat your car if you are not careful. I am pretty conservative but so far I have got airborne over a washout on the East beach, raced the incoming tide to get to high ground just in time, nearly drowned the car in a puddle of clear water that was way deeper than it looked and got bogged in some very soft sand (Maxtrax are way more useful than a winch).

The problem came back: complete inability to start. Just the battery light came on. This time I was bogged (again) in some soft sand on top of dune on the way back from Sandy Cape. The interesting thing was that the nose of the car was up and the back down. That got me thinking that every time the car would not start I was in that position: nose up on a hill. This explains why the problem was intermittent: I had been taking care to park nose down, partly because I was on sand and (where possible) I was parking where I could hill start if necessary.

Again, the thing that saved me was my little jump starter. I note utemad's comment about a ciggy jump starter but this little miracle did the trick and away I went. Just as well because I was otherwise completely buggered (including having 3 kids in the back seat asking, "Are we bogged again Daddy?"). I managed to find some demineralised water (most of the houses up here have solar and used deep cycle batteries). I had to buy 4L even though I only needed about 40mL. Once the battery was topped up, the problem has not come back. I even tried stopping nose up on a hill and the problem still did not come back.

My theory (and keep in mind that this is a theory of someone who knows less than he should about this newfangled electricity thing) is that the slightly low water levels in the cells were just high enough that everything was fine if I was horizontal but just low enough that when I was on a nose-up slope the lead plates were sufficiently uncovered that the battery could not create enough charge to kick the engine over. All of the cells were equally low in water.

The morals to this story: (1) check the acid level in your battery before going anywhere even slightly remote and (2) put 200mL of demineralised water in your your Bush toolbox.

I think there is a bigger problem there some where mate, adding 40ml of water would do stuff all to battery voltage. I would be getting it checked when you get back.