Volunteered to help my daughter resolve some issues with her 09 MCS. The car likes to drain the battery completely on an intermittent basis. Its already trashed a couple of batteries. A mini specialist in Phoenix had told her he thought the cooling fan was the issue as she said on occasion the fan would run and not shut down after the car was driven and hot. I was able to get the car good and hot the other day and the fan ran for almost 20 minutes after shutdown before I tapped on the K22 relay which shut the fan down. Other forum posts have indicated that the cooling fan should time out and shut down after a max run time of 15 minutes. Can anyone verify this is correct.? So at this point I'm going to replace the cooling fan and the k21/22 relays for the fan. I also checked for current draw when the car was acting normal and fully asleep and measured around 50 milliamps so at this point I haven't found any excessive parasitic loads. Has anyone experienced issues like this with R56 MINI's? Anything else I should be looking for? My first experience working on MINI's, I'll never complain about working on my old F150 again.

 

Congrats! You have the common R56 thermostat housing leak!
(seriously though, its ridiculous how high the failure rate is)

...Had the exact same issue, and after replacing the thermostat, all was good again.

 

Thanks for the response..Iwas thinking thermostat or coolant sensor could be involved...should I be seeing coolant on the motor or on the ground?

 

what kind of battery are you putting in ?

an are you "register the new battery with the ECM " ?

but does sad like you have a bad temp senser or housing

 

My '02 does this once in a while.
I turn the ignition on & off a couple of times, the equivalent of tapping the relays, & the fan stops.

Try changing the relays first.

 

Sometimes you will see (or smell) the coolant, but not always. In my case, the leak was small enough to evaporate on the engine, but large enough to cause the sensor to read the temp/thermo incorrectly (causing the fans run excessively, and drain your batt).

 

And my R56 the same no coolent level discrepancies 1st replaced thermostat sensor and it went away the fan stopped running after turning the car off, few days later check engine light and the coad.
My tech $645 to replace it.
Ben

 

Ben what work did your tech have to do to clear the fault code? No ibs on this car so I don't believe battery registration is required....This car also has ABS/SRS lights on....anyone have success clearing these with c310+ scanner?

 

ok Yeh if you don’t have the IBS you don’t need to register it

I’ve replaced 2 thermostat housing’ an both times, They never leaked’

 

When I had this problem on my '09 MCS, it was the coolant sensor. I had an error code indicating an improbable temp; I don't remember the number. My fan would not shut off, either.

 

To be honest with you the coad went away as soon as the work was done.
No additional work was done.
Ben

 

There is another failure that occurs that causes the fan to run for a long time after turning off the engine. S model MINIs have an auxiliary water pump near the oil filter that pumps water to the turbo to keep the turbo bearings cool. When this pump goes, MINI has programmed the computer to run the fan to cool the turbo after turning off the engine. It will throw a computer code, but it is a "buried" code that can only be read by BMW software and it is hard to get the MINI techs to dig deep into the computer to read this. It took me a year to find this one, but when the pump was replaced, the run-on fan was no more. Hope this helps...

 

Thanks for the heads up Eddie07S....I have been able to hear that pump run after the car has been warmed up. Guess that doesn't necessarily mean that it is functioning properly. I think at this point I'm going to replace the fan, both relays, and the coolant temp sensor. I decided I didn't want to do the thermostat unless absolutely necessary. We'll go from there. The car also has a leaking front crank seal. I told my daughter she needed to go to the dealer and have that done. If it was mine I'd probably try using the pvc seal driver method. No sure how long I want this fine piece of German engineering stuck in my garage.