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Re: 83 900 battery drain Posted by Ari [Email]  (#2847) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Ari) on Mon, 6 Jan 2003 08:43:30
In Reply to: 83 900 battery drain, John Scarpulla, Mon, 6 Jan 2003 02:16:39 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
300 ma is much more than normal. Normal should be on the order of 25-30 ma. Maybe 10 ma for the radio, 10 ma for the clock, and another 5-10 ma for the dome light circuitry. 300 ma shouldn't kill a good battery in 2-3 days, but you probably don't have a good battery any more. Car batteries aren't designed to be fully discharged - it steals life from them. After a bunch of full discharges, the plates will be pretty well sulfated, and the battery will lose life quickly even with normal draw. But fix the draw first, then replace the battery.
There is a trick to checking battery draw. Remove the ground cable from the battery. Then hook a jumper wire from the ground cable to the negative post of the battery. THEN hook up the meter in parallel with the jumper - from cable to post. Make sure the doors are closed. After about a minute, remove the jumper, but keep the meter hooked up. This is the quiescent current draw.
Why all this jumper stuff? When you disconnect the battery, everything loses power. When you hook it back up, a bunch of things get powered up, and as Trog alluded to, some things take a few seconds to get themselves sorted out. The jumper takes that current.
Pull one fuse at a time. The areas to concentrate on are Radio, Dome Light, Fuel Injection, and alarm (if you have one). I doubt you'll see a problem anywhere else. Remember that the radio gets two sources from the battery - one switched, one unswitched. Chances are you're pulling the switched source, and the unswitched fuse is hidden behind the radio. I'm not sure, as I'm not familiar with the radio wiring from the early '80s.
The alternator output voltage is great - no worries there. But I suspect you've just got a battery that's been weakened by repeated discharges/
posted by 192.249....
, Mon, 6 Jan 2003 15:13:43, Mon, 6 Jan 2003 08:43:30 <-- Viewing This Message
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