Battery Drain??

[BAYDOG]

Ok , the Ex was in a fender bender, and I just had it repaired. Now if it sits over night, the battery goes dead. Already replaced the battery, and Alt, and am getting almost 16 volts at the battery when she runs. Is there a way I can check with the Volt/Ohm meter if there is a drain due to a pinched wire they missed. ?? Of course this would be done with the vehicle off.

 

[agallant]

You sure it is not a bad battery? This happend on my mothers VW a few years ago. We thought that it was a light or some thing being left on. What it did was when she parked for the night i unplugged her battrie and in the morning plugged it back in and it was dead.

 

[rocco123]

If it were me, I would want to isolate the systems to see which is drawing current. The best way to isolate each system would be pulling fuses to see what is drawing current. Remember, ammeters go in series, so 1 by 1 you would need to get your meter in series with each circuit using the fuses as a place to break in. You can initially see what is being drawn by running the ammeter in series with the batt. itself, but that will only let you know there is a load. Each circuit will need to be checked to narrow down the search. It doesn't take a whole lot to kill a battery in a night.

 

[Runnin'OnEmpty]

You can remove the negative battery cable, and connect the multimeter positive probe to the cable, and the negative probe to the battery negative post. Select DC mA on the meter, largest scale to begin with.

After taking a reading, start pulling the fuses one by one, until the meter reading drops to near 0mA. This will isolate the circuit with the short.

There will still be a slight battery drain, even with no shorts, due to the radio memory, clock, PCM keep-alive memory, etc. (probably less than 10-20 mA or so....)

Post back the meter readings, and maybe we can help further.....