Battery Dies Everyday: Testing For Parasitic Draw

hey there viewers welcome back to the south main auto channel you guys have 2009 i do a cord it's got the big two four in it uh i mentioned this in a recent video we did on the jeep uh with the parasitic draw battery kept going dead uh same complaint this lady has battery goes dead it's been happening for months uh we're going to start the same process i had the battery hooked been inside for uh several hours had the charger on it a nuclear pretty sure this battery that's in its junk so we're going to start out with having to replace the battery to get a new battery do our test i'm pretty sure we're gonna do the same process we're gonna check it we're gonna see what the draw is see if we can't isolate down to what circuit it's on and then you know hopefully take it from there uh this car is newer you know about nine years newer and last one we did is a lot more modules it's going to be a little bit more complex and we'll see what we can do replace that says uh this one is only checking out at 255 cold cranking apps out of the 460 that it's supposed to have you can see the voltage is up on it so even though it's at 13 volts it won't start the car but it's been discharged to completely dead uh so many times it's pretty well spanked uh plus it's the wrong battery for the car too and you can see the last guy put it in just kind of bent and smash things over to make it fit so we're going to take this bracket off i'll see if i can't get it all beat back straight we'll get a good battery in it and then proceed the legend so we've got the correct battery installed they had this thing so smashed up and bashed up this upper bracket in the bottom of the box i beat everything back straight as the best i could uh you know so the battery's in secure so that's good uh so we're happy with that uh i've got the vehicle prepped currently uh things you want to watch for it doesn't have a hood latch switch an electric switch this one doesn't there's no wires going to this so we're not worried about that don't be just fooled by that look to see if there is a hood button you know somewhere as it needs to be depressed uh this car doesn't has no hood open indicator now the door latches on these hondues i don't know uh if it has any uh electronics in the latches good habit is just trip the latches it does have the door jar button right there so i don't have any kind of tool for that so i just put a set of c channel vice grips on them so the doors are open they're latched the buttons are depressed same thing with the trunk i open the trunk go up here trip the latch because it does have electronics going to it that indicate a trunk of jar and the same thing with this door trip the latch push the button in i've got the car you know shut off locked up prior to doing that i did have it running you know make sure the battery is good test the battery batteries good shut the car off left everything else how the customer leaves it as far as dome light switches i do see we have a green blinky light under the dash so that's an observation we can make right there whatever that is who knows uh keep that in mind don't see anything extra on the key fob so the car right now is turned off locked up just like she would leave it as it's parked and the battery is hooked up so i don't know what the time is to let this thing time out the negative battery cable is loose and a lot of people asked in our last videos how we hooked up our connection our meter so we're reading amperage so we need to hook our meter in series so what's that mean just in case you don't know we'll go to the whiteboard we have battery plus and minus then we have our negative battery cable right here so we want to take our meter this is our meter in case you didn't know we're going to hook one lead to the negative battery and the other one to the negative battery terminal because we want the current to be flowing through our meter so it can display the amperage now not all meters can display amperage the majority of them can things you want to be aware of is the load that's currently in place you know let's say this uh has a huge battery drawn this thing's drawn let's say you know 15 amps or you just shut the car off and it's drawn 15 amps you hook up that to most meters it's gonna blow the fuse in your meter and most meter fuses are either difficult to replace or expensive that's why uh prior to doing this you can you know a safe bet is to you know put a current clamp around there see how many amps roughly it's drawing and then hook it through your meter or um [Music] what is the safe bet i mean that's the safest bet you can see uh you know and if you have your meter hooked up and you accidentally turn the key on or somebody opens the door that could you know cause an over current blow the fuse in your meter i like using my little snap-on meter because it takes a 10 amp uh blade fuse now back when i was a young buck i was your age kid before cars had a lot of fancy modules and crap in them you could just stick a test light in series and the light would light up uh if you're doing that on a modern car oftentimes you know the test light isn't gonna carry enough current to satisfy the modules to turn them off so what i like to do is leave it you can use a shunt also i know there's guys that have videos on you doing it that way i leave the battery hooked up i try to wiggle it up and avoid disconnecting it i try to sneak my negative lead underneath to get on the terminal [Music] if i can because disconnecting it and reconnecting it you know you've got to start the process all over again which can be a pain in the doozo so once we get that far with it i try to avoid disconnecting so there we are now our meter is hooked in series you don't want that to go back over and touch if it does you'll notice it on your meter because you won't have any amperage draw another good thing to pay attention to particularly on honda when you're unhooking and hooking up the battery listen do you hear something you know like the ac clutch automatically turn on something like that that'll give you a big clue so we're going to see how many amps this thing's drawing and then we're going to have to let it sit for more than 100 milliamps we'll go up on a 5 amp scale we're drawing 600 almost like our last video about 680 milliamps so put it on a one amp scale so we get some detail so right now we're drawing about 680 milliamps on average and you can see it's got some stuff going on there could be our blinky light that we have happening so that kind of parade across the screen we're going to give it some time no idea how long these things take to time out but if we come back in a half an hour and we're still at 675 we're going to assume that's our draw so we've been sitting over here a while so we're gonna fire the meter back up i got out our other meter took the lid off the fuse box out here uh another good thing to do also when you're doing parasitic draws is uh like any other repair check see if there's any bolt ins uh i believe honda has one on this for the ac clutch which is a pretty common issue with these uh now right after i shut the camera off there a second ago before we did our big our big wait time i did pull off that data link connector thing she had under the dash um and the amperage only went down a couple milliamps so let's see where it's at it's been sitting here a while so it's still drawn 591 milliamps as you can see there uh so uh i think if i plug in her i don't know whether some kind of gps device or something plugged into the data link i just wanted to get that out i just took it out already said that so we're gonna switch back here to a graph or a digital readout so there we are 591 now just like in our last video uh or a video that we've done previously on a on a jeep just gonna use the meter uh we're gonna put it in millivolts and then we're gonna go across each fuse you know touching the the two terminals on the back of each fuse and because a fuse is essentially resistance in the circuit if there's current flow in it we're going to read voltage drop across it so this is the long boring portion of it somebody's been in here you can see these relays you don't know if you guys can but the top so the relays are all busted up they've been obviously squeezed with pliers but we're just going to start definitely start anywhere we'll start up here and theoretically if there's no current flowing it should go down to zero millivolts and it does and then we'll go to the next one some of these are kind of a pisser to get on but what we're looking for is any kind of voltage drop across any fuse here and sometimes this can be too tedious to do but i just do them right in a row see what we have like this one here we have 3.6 millivolts of voltage drop across this fuse so that's interesting now technically i should go down and do the rest of them but let's just see for grins and giggles what that one is let's figure out how this thing goes here uh go like this was it really so what do we have i'll figure it out here folks bear with me okay there's a 40 amp okay so it looks like fuse number 15. it's a 10 amp and it says backup so it's one right above my nugget there back up uh we could look on power probes chart and see if that millivolts equates to any amps or i can go find us a pair of pliers 590. yeah let's see we're gonna yank that was that 10 amp fuse oh boom look at that drops right down to 60 milliamps uh which is pretty acceptable but four is a whole lot better so pulling that fuse out there's your problem lady another defective fuse uh so we're gonna take and put that back in see what our drawing goes up to olf so it's at 900 see if it goes back to our original it may power something that has to we have to wait again but at any rate we're on the uh we're on the right track there lee let me get a diagram there's no sense in checking any more fuses uh with the meter okay so we're quickly back to our 590. uh there's no sense in checking anymore simply because when we yank that we go down to four milliamps we know that all the current that's going from the battery is going to that circuit so goody goody all right so i got us a diagram and this is where it gets stupider because this is a little more complex than the jeep so here's fuse 15 the 10 amp it comes down they call it the backup view as it goes into the driver under dash uh relay fuse box feeds the drivers nicu comes out of there and then feeds a whole bunch of other stuff including but not limited to the immobilizer gauge control power window master switch drivers courtesy lights on a four-door passenger courtesy lights on a four-door comes down to this module but it says fuse not used i have to keep that in mind i wonder if that fuse holder is there if somebody put a fuse in it if it gets things kind of stupid remember that on that genesis we did um comes over here feeds the audio unit and hvac sub display unit so lots of plausible things one thing i notice is this drivers junction box one i'm curious to know what this is because this has wires going in it so we have our feed coming in it now this wire over here i don't think we have to worry about because that's only on cars with navigation so we're not worried about that what i'd like to do is see you know we have current flow we have little electrons flowing through this circuit we know that and they're coming in here into this driver's mic u uh multiplexing control unit i think is what the integrated multi was it mick uh multiplexing integrated control unit i think honda calls it it's like a little module we have power going into it we have current flowing into it is it all being absorbed in there or is it coming out and going down this leg this leg this leg or this leg if we can find this what looks to be like a junction uh perhaps at that point we can go and test each individual wire to see which you know sub-circuit it's running off from from the main circuit so uh so far we've narrowed down if we're using our bullseye diagram we're uh on the second circle right now we've identified the draw now we've identified the circuit now this we got to go in here and identify the sub-circuit and then hopefully identify the component so one thing i'm thinking though or i should say one thing i observed is once i tripped all the door latches put all the vice grips on when i locked the doors the horn didn't blow and that usually tells me that there's a door open a component like that i did before unhook the battery made sure the horn blew but that was one thing i observed is when i double locked the horn didn't chirp so i see this runs part of the immobilizer keyless entry i'm curious and it also runs the dlc the data link connector so i am curious if there's something wonky with the with the key locks or something like that so i think what i'm gonna do just for poop and laughter before we even get down into that i might hook up the battery maybe plug in a scan tool see if i can see this mic u i don't know if it communicates if we can see the door latch positions and stuff door lock key in that kind of thing make sure it's not something screwy there so i'm thinking our observational skills may have potentially led us in the right direction noticing that when we hit the key fob the horn didn't blow however the door is locked and i can show you that so right now let me turn this off so we have the key and the door is in the unlocked position but if we use the key it locks and it locks both sides i don't know if you can see that over there but you can see the dome light comes on and when we lock it we double lock it the dome light goes out because it thinks the doors are shut because the switches are tripped and i see that this door lock moves so that's good uh and then it recognizes the doors being shut but it should audibly blow the horn looking at our diagram knowing that it has something to do with this keyless entry business you know kind of reinforce this thought for me so i'm going to take and stick the key back well we'll leave the key out of it because hondas are kind of fussy like that but one thing i notice is we unlock the door it unlocks when we use the button down here but when i lock it nothing happens it makes noise but nothing happens now when i go over to the passenger excuse me passenger side this one does lock it also over there it flips the flipper okay so that's a little bit of a clue uh as i mentioned i wanted to plug in a scan tool just to kind of see what's going on so let's turn this let me turn you off baby oh yeah that was easy so now it's turned on wait for our data to come back i looked through all the door data and this is what i saw that i thought was kind of peculiar driver's door lock switch switch status off and then the switch status unlock it says on now i'm not pushing that button so it should say off so i'm going to hit the lock so when i hit the lock the unlock says off but the lock doesn't say on and it should but when i let it go the unlock says on now i'm going to hit the unlock button and it says off and it shouldn't but when i let the switch go it changes its status to on i'm pretty near certain that this switch is done gone and got wonky on us which that would be awesome if we found it that quick you can see it's been kind of buggered up there i'm gonna see what it takes to unplug this driver side switch i assume we probably have to pull the door panel i know i'm rabbit trailing a little but it's a pretty good hypothesis in my opinion um shut that off it's a pretty good hypothesis i think based on the data gathered knowing that this circuit does go to the driver's side master switch um knowing that it's kind of going goofy on us seeing some physical damage out here i don't know if a dog chewed on it or a lady with super long fingernails or something uh he one wire to get a hold of you baby so he's looking at service data how to get to the switch screws behind here pull your speaker pull the trim yada yada got to this part there's a little cover here you pull to get the screw out i'm looking look at what i see the connector for the switch so we're just going to give that an unplug because that is just well that looks like just the mirror there so there's the bigger switch connector here i'm going to set the camera down see what i got to do to unplug it and we'll unplug that baby see if our draw disappears not too bad to unplug had a little swingy doodad on it here you've got to depress that little center tab and then swing the white connector out in this direction and then unplug like i say that one is just for the power mirrors so we'll leave that one alone i don't know without having inputs from it if it's going to screw something up but we'll find out is that a power supply on it while we're sitting there with the key on remove that this terminal is still loose i'm going to take it hook up our meter my glee some lunch will come back out we'll check it and see it's where we're at here we're gonna hook the negative one to the negative terminal i gotta be so negative hook that one to the negative battery lead make sure we have a good connection there i think so we should have current flowing through this we'll just see where that's at real quick before we hurry up and wait now your meter will still float current even though it's turned off or at least this one does like i said this uses just a standard 10 amp car fuse that's why i like using this because if i screw up it's not too big a deal survey says we're already lower we're getting low baby so we're going to give it some time now i like to look at it on a graph sometimes because sometimes that can give you clues also especially if something's turning on and then off so let's give this some time and see what happens we didn't have to give it time because we're already down to 18 milliamps so that's it the problem solved we're done it was hovering around to like a buck and a half but i remembered this thing powers the dlc and what did we have plugged in this guy's little dongle so so i unplugged it and it immediately dropped to 20 milliamps more than sufficient that is perfect that battery lasts a long long time so there's that we're done using some logical deduction that's it we're over show's over let's quit so i think on this car we can we can redo our bullseye a little more complicated not more complicated just we can add another step so big bullseye again you guys remember when we do this that's a terrible circle the outer ring is verify verify draw and that's what we did uh verified draw battery and i would say observations so we observed you know the door locks were kind of funny no horn blow the battery we knew was junk and we observed the draw of whatever it was you know 800 milliamps so we did all that we made our observations we prepared the car you know latching the latches making everything good and then we came down what was our next string does anybody remember because this guy doesn't then we want to come down and we want to find the circuit i think that was our next one we identified the circuit we identified it as that this backup fuse so fuse 15 circuit number 15 10 amp and we did that using the voltage drop testing okay and then from there because of how this one worked more complicated than the last one comes down we needed to identify the sub circuit what's up buddy oh okay i'll be right in uh so we had to identify the sub circuit now what we would have done if we didn't you know go back to our first ring and you know use our observations look at the sub-circuits and make a plausible hypothesis to say you know what this power window master switch might be a little funny let's have a look at some data that's how we did this one if we didn't my step was going to be to find this junction and what i would do is find these wires coming out and i would stick a current clamp on this one then this one then this one and this one then this one and say hey you know do we have any power coming through the mcu and going out on this circuit going out on this circuit this circuit this circuit or this circuit and if we did now there's some circuits to those and i would you know at that point either get to the component and unplug it or if that's a pain in the hoo-hoo you know go to this splice find this circuit this circuit this one or this one you know and find out where it's going now i know some of these are irrelevant because you know no fuse there you know no navigation here but you get the gist so we found the sub circuit uh and that was the driver window switch and then you know if we were doing that test we would have gone to this splice and we would have found current flowing on this wire here that leaves us with the power window master switch or the driver's door courtesy light that's only on a four-door so we can cross that one off so we would have narrowed it right down very quickly this splice to be going out on this circuit right here power window master switch once you find out which circuit it's going on then you get right to the bullseye and that's the component that's the drawer that's the big failure so there's that for what it's worth i should patent that right mrs though yeah what's up you're looking beautiful today by the way oh thanks everybody you do so what's up you gonna take a vote on it yes isn't this still looking beautiful today no flick your hair let me get a fan on come on making lunch okay good one and the phone's for you and your lunch is ready okay we're done anyways show's over bye all right folks we're going to leave this one at that i don't know if i'm going to get the job on it ladies from uh out of town hours so away so uh she'll probably just take it to her regular shop now that you know now that they know what the problem is apparently there's been some you know some issues with us for quite a long time and you know nobody's been able to resolve it but you can see using our method to go big and to hone right in on a pinpoint test it works good and i would like to say that it works good every single time if you just have just logical deductions you know just a methodical process and try not to skew away from it i did rabbit trail slightly uh chasing an observation i wouldn't put a ton of time into that if it looked like when i checked data everything kind of checked out normal i'm not going to go you know chasing rabbit trails because that's how you get really sidetracked you know i think it might be this or i think it might be this or i read on identifix it could be you know xyz that's that's going to really lead you astray follow the facts and that's all there is to it just the data collect the data follow the data and it will lead you to the problem every single time now sometimes it might be difficult uh particularly as the cars get newer there's a lot more garbage on them and if we get down to a component that's particularly a module we might have to go through and read some theory and operation what's this module do uh you know what data network is it on you know there's some other other issues that you know perhaps we can cover in later videos if we get other parasitic draws in and that are more complicated than the last two that we've done these ones were quite simple just because we followed you know a plan so plan the work work the plan get the job done that should be on the t-shirt anyways what should be on a t-shirt is that's not even a good transition so why don't you guys transition down to that comment section leave your questions comments criticisms concerns while you're down there subscribe ring that bell and just from my reviewers if i can do it you can do it thanks for watching

Channel: South Main Auto LLC

Views: 313,456

Keywords: parasitic draw, parasitic draw test, parasitic, parasitic drain, draw, parasitic battery draw, testing parasitic draw, how to do a parasitic draw test, parasitic draw testing, battery drain, parasitic draw test with multimeter, how to perform a parasitic draw test, parasitic battery drain test, how to perform a parasitic draw test on your vehicle, current draw, drain, easy parasitic draw test, how to test parasitic draw, / camper parasitic draw test, how to test for parasitic draw

Id: eGz9BRJ09Rw

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020