I have the smarty kit but it will work similarly....the winch is wired directly to the terminals of the aux battery...so it doesn't matter what the solenoid is doing. With the jeep off you will only have about 13V and not alternator voltage of about 14.5. But you winch should still work...

When I first got my smarty I had a bad solenoid that wouldn't close so my aux battery never charged. Anyway, I ran the winch once to stretch my line and I ran my compressor 3 times. Then the battery was drained.

get a volt meter at measure the voltage across the terminals of your aux battery.

I run my power plant compressor all the time with the jeep off, something is up.....

 

I would guess that the auxillary battery connections are poor. The winch takes a lot of power, meaning the connections have to be pretty good. A poor or corroded connection can show potential (12 v) but that won't be enough to run the winch.
Alternately check the ground wire were it connects on the winch. With the system off the ground via the mount bolts can't feed back to the aux. battery. This effect is the same as a bad battery connection.

 

X2 First throw a meter on the aux battery and see what its voltage is. I too got a bad isolator. Once I figured it out, I contacted John at Benchmark and had a new one in a couple of days. You know a pict of your wiring for the winch wouldn't be a bad thing for us to take a look at either.

 

I would set up my winch to work with my engine on or off. Think of this, your engine dies for whatever reason leaving you in a pickle... you cant turn the engine over no matter what you try, if you need your winch, what are you going to do?

Everything I run, I run off of my battery. With the engine running, the battery stays charged. But if for some reason I need to use my CB or lights or winch, I don't want to have to depend on my engine to work to use this stuff.

 

Thanks for the input guys....I cleaned and tightened all the connections at the winch and it's working now with the engine off and better then ever.....