Chevy Truck: Battery Dies Overnight

hey there viewers and welcome back to the self made knowledge you know that's our 2014 chevrolet it's a gmc 1500 uh kind of the same thing it's got the big five three customer complaint is that the battery is always dead it appears to have a newer battery in it when i went to pull it in and indeed it was smoked there was nothing a zippy zap not even a dinger uh threw a jumper on it brought it in threw it on the charger for an hour so left it on nuclear got a bit of a charge and it starts under its own power went through you know shut the key off opened the door latched all the latches uh we've got our vantage multimeter hooked in series so we're running current through our meter so we can let it sit here for 20 minutes half hour whatever to see where it ends up right now it's holding pretty steady about 800 milliamps but i do want to give it some time it's only been about you know 10 minutes however long it took me to do that stuff so in about a half an hour 40 minutes hour or whatever we'll check and see is that current draw at that current time if it is that's way too much and then we're gonna use the process that we've always used to track it down and see where is it going i guess it's been about nine minutes because that uh clock and it resets because i always yank the battery out of it uh so we'll give it some time and you can see i'm just over here in uh series with the battery in line with the battery i did unhook the uh little blinky light rust evader gizmo that all the dealers sell just so and they only draw like one or two milliamps because they're fake so we'll leave that on hook that way we don't get the bleep and light um the the blinky light over on the little magic box you can see that we have something that spikes it up to almost a full amp periodically i don't know if that's normal or not but we'll give her some time see folks in uh you know half hour 40 minutes because i have the patience of the squirrel uh when i'm trying to hurry up and wait uh it's been 17 minutes when i busted out the dvom now you guys have seen in previous videos if not i'll put a link on how i check for a parasitic draw and essentially what we do is we measure current or we measure i'm sorry voltage drop across the fuse because if there's current flow through the fuse there's going to be voltage drop across the fuse otherwise if there wasn't the fuse wouldn't work um so then you know we go down through and like i said you'll watch that video you'll see how i did it so as i'm waiting for this thing to to go down i'm just kind of poking along and seeing who's hot who's not and i got over here to this 20 amp fuse here and if i put my test leads across it this is as far as i've made i haven't gone across all of them yet but let me uh get it under these fuses they're getting smaller and smaller kind of pisser but i have about 52 to 53 millivolts of voltage drop across this fuse now if there was no current flow it should be like this fuse here i don't know if you guys can see the meter or not but essentially let me make sure that's correct now this fuse could just be open also but that's 0.00 millivolts and when i come here back onto this one we are at 52 to 53 millivolts but like i say that could be um from an open fuse too so we're going to yank that out because i'll show you that if that fuse is open we could be just getting tricked let me get a pair of so what we're going pliers do is we're going to yank that fuse the voltage over there did not or the current draw did not change over there and sure as thunder that sucker is open so that's that's junk um let's see where were we over here it's a cluster of four number fifteen one two three fifteen trailer park lamp so anyhow so that's something to do with his trailer lights uh like crappy wiring on the trailer anyhow i just wanted to show you that i don't know if you can see my screen but uh if you see something like that don't get too awful excited because that's what it could be could be a simple open or could have found the problem unfortunately we're still waiting i'm still impatient and i'm still going to keep checking 32 minutes has passed folks even though it's been mere seconds too now i have gone through every single fuse here the left side instrument panel fuse box right side well all while waiting patiently uh and nothing every single fuse that is accessible so these little low profile fuses or whatever they call now and the mini fuses and the triple fuses uh none of them all is 0.00 so it's kind of interesting because typically one of these circuits will feed you know other circuits inside and usually we'll start to narrow it down now uh the next thing that has to be done that is not as easy are these jk fuses which on these chevrolets you can't just pop the covers off them and and go across them so they have the plastic you know lid on them so the only thing you can do at that point is an old dance i call the hokey pokey and you need to use pair of pliers you don't need to turn yourself about however i hate doing the hokey pokey simply because when you you know grab a hold of one of these little guys you got to be careful because you can break them if you squeeze them and then when you pull it out and stick it back in sometimes it resets you know whatever module it may have been feeding which is a pain in the who and you know i'll save you all the heartache and pain i went through and i'm doing hokey pokey out here and i'm getting all the way down and it's always the last fuse you pull however in this case indeed not only was it the last fuse i pulled it was actually the last use in the box to be pulled so this fuse right here and uh let me get my meter let's see we're going to look at this again i haven't gone any further than what i just told you now let me come around here we'll we'll get a little uh uncomfortably close ah let's see can you see that if i get it just right i should make it have a glare and nobody can see anything 7 92. let's back out of this let's just get uh some digital action up here it may be easier for you to see and i do care despite what you may think so let's see can you see that 792 milliamps now we go come over here the absolute last fuse pretty sure my eyes did not deceive me there you go and strikingly enough when i reinstalled it oh wait a minute oh you hear that fella you hear that indy there's something going clicky clanky when i do that but i was going to say oddly enough when i reinstall it it just goes back to the 800 milliamps there's something down yonder that is uh clicking however that's perfect so that's good and let's see where we're at here make sure we got this right side up number six so it's this fuse in the fuse box numero 6-0 units trace four five six four-wheel drive track 4wd trec 30 amp and i do hear something clicking under there that's weird let me uh i think this thing's kind of a stripped down jobby let me look inside see if it's got the shifter in the floor nope it's got the knob on the dash he's got a four button selectable knob two wheel four look four wheel four low and auto we're gonna leave that out we're gonna get us a diagram because we need to know who does this little guy run is it the shift motor [Applause] is it the transfer case lock uh because i believe these have a locked solenoid on the transfer case uh or what in the thunder it feeds and then we'll have to i don't keep doing the hokey pokey so i got some diagrams folks i think we are safe we'll turn this off for now just so our battery doesn't go bad and that's turned out from center stuck to the side so we tracked that down uh relatively quickly there then we're impatient we didn't just keep waiting uh let me get a pointing apparatus we'll utilize this here now this is a power distribution diagram and i know it's not ideal trying to show this but uh let's see here let me find this one again so it's right here and just let me move my camera here a little bit so let's see right here so this uh 4wd trek fuse 30 amp that's when we're at it comes down it feeds the transfer case control module and also feeds the transfer case motor so now we know the two things uh that it that it does and being that it feeds that motor and we hear it clicking under there i got us a diagram for uh for that something a little more detailed uh so we'll have a little peek here that so let's see here i tried to simplify it i tried to uh highlight it before i printed it so there's our fuse again so we're going to file both of these out so now this leg comes out goes over to another diagram comes out of there comes up into this instrument panel junction back out of that junction down here across down back to 19 over here and then we can see it is the battery plus for the transfer case shift control module lower left-sided dash so uh and it is hot at all times so that feeds the transfer case module now we'll look at the other leg of it that comes out goes over goes down round it down comes over here down and boom transfer case motor on transfer case this is what we're hearing down here now i believe uh you know our symbol down here that is our actual transfer case motor and then there is a position sensor rotational sensor here of some sort i believe uh on these i haven't worked on a ton of these four wheel drives yet but enough to know i think that's the case if we followed that back uh but that's neither here nor there because we're looking at this here and that's a solenoid and i believe it's the transfer case lock solenoid now these transfer cases i believe have to lock and unlock prior to engaging the motor you can't just apply power to this motor and make the transfer case motor shift um i know that because i had a guy that burnt his almost to the ground uh trying to run jumper wires to it and that's how i know that because i remember like oh yeah wow yeah okay it's got a lock you got to disengage the lock to turn the motor on so i think that's what we're hearing uh so if that's the case of course i've got these wires now so they're not very bright so we can't see them but we're going to see in order for a solenoid to work it needs a power supply but then it's going to need the ground supply so let's see where that comes from yellow brown goes up and around down over goes to number nine the niner goes over here transfer case lock solenoid control so what does that leave us for options and we know because it has a full time power that that has to be a ground side switch to turn that lock on and off so the options are something in this control module over here is saying hey unlock that little fella little fella or b this thing's short of the ground so what i would do if it were me and in this case it is we're going to go down to this connector this big honkey right here because this thing could be either receiving the command to lock or unlock i guess it is i don't know which way it goes i think it unlocks um or the transfer case motor here is just junk and we unplug it if we unplug this connector jumper just power to this and that thing still goes then we know the transfer case motor is junk now if we go down here and we check this and this is indeed receiving a ground signal to say hey unlock me little guy then we know all right well we got to chase this out is this wire short of the ground is the transfer case control module gone wonky and you know trying to do thing on it on its own with the key off that's what we need to find out let's go down on this little girl and see what we got down there we're going old school here folks wow how do you guys do this so there is our daewoo shift motor it says smt daewoo okay here's our wires that's for poop and laughter let's unplug it come on baby i'm gonna set you down folks so it is unplugged and i don't see now if we're gonna end up chasing this you know if it's a short to ground then we'll obviously throw it up in the air but uh it feels like everything is kind of attached back through here doo doo i don't see any green crusties uh theoretically we can go up there and put our fuse back in it and we should no longer have a draw let's just go double check that i'm sure this is what we heard uh clicking and clunking under i'll move here back up so we can see but i think more obviously we'll be able to see if it clicks yeah i don't hear any clicking we'll insert that fully and then we should still be good here because i haven't opened the doors or done any of that oh okay perfect so we've isolated it too how much you get buddy we've isolated it to that uh to that motor okay let's keep going now yellow with a brown that should not have a ground on it we've determined where was it here transfer case lock solenoid control that should not have a ground on it so let's grab a powered test light and see if that is the case yellow is brown because red with grey is supposed to be our power and then yellow brown uh which is right got yellow purple yellow black assume yellow brown hmm did i bring my diagram down gosh dang it i didn't i think it's the one right next to it i think it was c and d ah you ding dong well anyhow we'll have to double check so technically our fuse is back in so we should have power here we do and then this should not be a ground and it's not it's not it's not dinging away at us anyways okay what we'll do it's like a ding-dong i forgot my diagram we're going to have to double check that to make sure so that's good we should not have a ground on yellow brown no ground on the yellow brown unless the module was trying to unlock it it looked like it should click yep i do believe that it is shorted internally now another way that we could do this if we could see up in here if i get a mirror we can hook to just the lock wire so the second one in from the left side here we could do that with our power probe apply power to it if this thing locks then it is then is junk because theoretically it should not be able to activate that solenoid without the other side of it okay let's see i'm just going to try to feel the pins here you hear that folks that transfer case shift motor it's absolute garbage so i'm hoping that made sense to you folks let's just look at it as um how do i look at it you know we could look at it as a light bulb perhaps or anything you know a load you know it's just a load so we have battery plus going into a load in this case a solenoid and then to turn that solenoid on we need battery negative to activate this whether it's a a motor or a bulb or a solenoid or whatever you know whatever it is whatever type of load that is we need power and ground turn it on in this case in this case we know we have a full-time power because that's our fuse and then the negative side is done you know by in this case by control module the transfer case control module that's what turns that on and off you know a transistor so once we identified that this fuse is the one drawing current we could hear this solenoid clicking so we know you know our power is going down there it's going through and stuff we need to determine is this thing shorted out somewheres inside the transfer case uh locked solenoid or inside that shift motor or is this wire actually doing what it's supposed to be doing is it you know providing a ground when it's technically not supposed to so we went down with our power probe we unplugged it and we could see you know once we unplugged it we had you know battery plus here which was obvious and then we've seen here that we had no ground which was good because that tells us that there is no ground supply therefore this has to be shorted internally to prove that we took our power probe and we hooked on to just this side of it you know isolating you know the ground side and plus side and we applied our own power to it completely open circuited on this end and it clicked we heard it thereby making this the culprit it is 100 shorted out inside of itself providing itself with its own ground so hopefully that makes sense to you if not i failed miserably in which case you'd want to go watch this guy because he's awesome so that's that folks a bad transfer case shift motor causing your battery to die overnight i don't make it up folks we just follow the facts uh so before you go and start unplugging your radio and sending your cluster in and changing your alternator and 13 different batteries you know just use this process and we have to follow the facts so the easiest thing most non-invasive thing to do is how we did it which we've shown in other videos voltage drop across accessible fuses after that one leg again one leg out you do the hokey pokey you pluck the fuses which sometimes is not great we also learned that sometimes open circuited fuses can give you a false positive so just be mindful what you're looking at and follow the facts get the diagrams where do you get the diagrams i've done a video on that also you can go on you can get the diagrams you don't need big fancy scan tools and expensive stuff to do this dvom i like to use this one simply because it's easier for both of us to see and as i age that's a thing uh and that's that the thing i want you to do before i age anymore is head to that comment sections the comments the questions the concerns the insti the facebook and just my reviewers i can do it you can do it thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: South Main Auto LLC

Views: 168,143

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Id: 4hRPUFr380s

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021