Customer is Tired of this PARASITIC DRAW!! (Toyota Avalon)

hi everyone welcome back to pine hollow out of diagnostics today in the shop we have a mint 2002 toyota avalon uh with the legendary 1mz power plant the v6 this thing is top of the line beautiful shape the only customer complaint here at 126 000 miles is he has a parasitic draw he says he lets the car sit for maybe a week up to two weeks and it barely cranks still starts up so it sounds like a small parasitic draw but nevertheless it's annoying uh he has another avalon 2002 2003 that doesn't have a parasite drawn that one you can let sit for a month and it'll start right up so you can see here he's got his you know battery maintainer leads tie down there has been dealing with this problem for a while he said the battery is fairly fresh it's a few years old from 2019 and he just wants the problem fixed he said it's annoying to hook up the battery charger every time he leaves the car for more than a few days so let's diagnose it so right now the car's asleep ignition key's out doors are closed let's hook up an in-series meter and see if there is a parasitic draw right now at the moment so for this measurement i'm using the astro ai this is a fantastic value big screen and it does everything you want so we're going to the amp port amp and com set it to the amp scale make sure it's zero and now i'm going to hook this up to the negative battery cable let's put this right here and loosen up the clamp so you want one side on the wire and the other side once you lift up the terminal you don't want to wake the car up slide your other clamp underneath and attach it to the battery post now you can lift this off put it to the side and we see 189 milliamps so 190 milliamps that's way too high for comparison i measured the parasitic draw on his 2003 avalon and that one was 20 milliamps 20 is a good number somewhere between 10 and 20 depending how fancy your car is how many modules it has um you know that's that's reasonable this one is almost at 200 so it's 10 times the allowable good number so there's definitely a draw where do we start well let's start right at this main fuse box and measure the voltage drops on all the accessible small fuses now let me get my multimeter okay so for the voltage drop measurements we're measuring voltage drops across the fuse if there's any current running through any one of these fuses we'll see a very small voltage drop on our meter this is an old school beckman industrial meter just a simple you know two probes and that's really handy for these voltage drop checks across fuses so let's just start from here you see 0.0 millivolts there's no draw through that fuse that one again zero so i already checked all the fuses and the only one that had any draw was this 30 amp let's see 0.2 millivolts across this 30 amp fuse so the bigger the fuse rating the smaller the voltage drop obviously but there it's not zero you want to see 0.0 okay so now that's the only small fuse that has a draw and i'm just going to pull it because on old cars you don't need to wait 40 minutes for it to go to sleep this thing goes to sleep in you know under a minute so it's not going to be time consuming if we pull a fuse and wake the car up or something let me pull that fuse and we'll see on the meter if the draw goes to you know closer to zero boom six milliamps so that this is definitely our culprit now let's put it back in see what happens we're at 0.8 i can hear the cd changer doing something let's just wait a while now it's 20 milliamps just like the other car very interesting so something wasn't asleep i pulled that fuse put it back in and something went to sleep so what's the next step we need to see what this fuse feeds now it is the 30 amp right here it's labeled d c c i have no idea what d c c is for that we need to go to oem wiring diagrams and see where that goes okay so we have our vehicle pulled up on all data power distribution diagrams now these are the non-oe but they're handy because they actually tell you where each fuse goes what it feeds so let's find dcc okay right there dcc 30 amp in the engine room fuse box and that feeds ecu b radio and dome fuse in under the dash fuse box okay so we pulled that fuse put it in and the car went to sleep it went from 200 milliamps to 20. very interesting so this is hot at all times we can see that it comes from a right up here from there's the battery boom so that's hot at all times that's the main power feed to the radio ecub and dome fuse okay so now we need to go under the dash let the car go to sleep you know we'll see the parasitic draw again and measure the voltage drop across these three fuses to narrow it down further that's our next step okay so we have our 20 milliamps how do we reproduce the parasitic draw i think it's as easy as turning the ignition key well let's try to first turn it to accessory turn on our radio today maybe and turn it back off close the door and see how fast this thing goes to sleep and if it goes back to the parasitic draw or if it goes back down to 20 milliamps okay so 0.8 i love how fast older cars go to sleep it makes parasitic draw testing actually fun instead of annoying time consuming so fords are the worst i'm going to sleep really slowly okay so we're already less than the 200 milliamps and i assume it's going to drop down to 20 very quickly there you go so less than like 30 seconds so turning the key to accessory and back off did not reproduce the draw let's turn it to ignition to on [Music] okay so now our cluster is alive and fancy display there turn it back off watch that again and so 0.37 okay this time we have 226 milliamps 0.3 0.25 wait a little bit okay so that's it so after one ignition cycle parasitic draw came back so now okay there we go it finally went to 190 which where it was when the car was asleep like long term so now what i want to do open up the door press the button to make the car think that the door is closed then we'll go right to the fuse box under the dash and measure those three fuses that this 30 amp dcc fuse feeds with our multimeter measure the voltage drop on those fuses and uh go from there all right doors open i'm gonna install a clamp right on this door jam button so our dome lights should go off and the fuse box is right here we have a nice label dome lights are off okay so now we're going for those three fuses which was radio ecub and dome dome lights right there dome radio ecub let's measure the voltage drop on those all right let's measure the voltage drop on these fuses using our meter so the first one is dome which is right here you can see the meter there let me put my leads on the fuse come on it's easier doing this with two hands 0.00 okay next one is ecu b which is the same row okay so zero maybe zero point one okay so minimal last one is radio okay not zero 0.6 millivolts so the radial fuse interesting now let's do the same procedure so we have 190 milliamps let's pull this radial fuse so right here this 15 amp pull that out we go to 17 milliamps that's good so now we've narrowed down that our draw goes through the dcc fuse through the radio fuse and what is the radial fuse feed well it's not just the radio it's radio stereo component amplifier and multi-display okay so those three components and keep in mind that the parasitic draw only happens after an ignition on key cycle not accessory so can we determine that using that fact if it's the radio the amplifier or the multi-display let's take a look at more wiring diagrams so here's the diagram for the radio player this has the fancy seven speaker system you can see the power feeds are the radio fuse hot at all times and then ecu acc which is just an accessory position that makes sense so just two power feeds there and then here's a stereo component amplifier and those have the same two power feeds that makes sense and that is it for the power feeds so i can say right now since the parasitic draw does not happen when you just turn the key to accessory and back off the problem is going to be in the multi-display let's take a look at the diagram for that unit okay so this is our combination meter so it's the whole cluster assembly plus that whatever date and time fuel economy display it's all in one unit it's called a multi-display and let's look at the power feeds for that unit so it has some warning lights not really interested in that we're interested in the logic circuits in here charge buttons all right here we go we have the radio fuse that's hot at all times accessory fuse you know hot an accessory you see this power supply box right here and then this yellow and red i assume that's going to be our ignition source so follow it through yep ecu ignition so whenever you turn the key to ignition this sucker wakes up and when you turn the key off take it out it does not fully power down and draws 200 milliamps when we remove the constant power fuse and put it back in it does go to sleep then everything's fine so at this point the problem we can say definitively is in the multi-display unit and you know that's causing the parasitic drop now what are the solutions to this problem replacing the whole cluster on this car i don't think it's gonna happen i talked to the customer he's like you know if you really need to install a battery kill switch it's not his primary vehicle he only drives it maybe a couple times a week i'm like well that's not the most elegant solution can we think of some trick so that constant battery power maybe make it an accessory or ignition power now it does feed the radio so you do want when you turn the key to accessories so the radio powers up obviously um so can we make that fuse the radio fuse instead of constant battery power switch it to an accessory power will that work let's try that temporarily and see how the system behaves i assume that if the cluster doesn't have constant battery power it'll lose the time and the date now is that a big deal no a customer says it's not a big deal so he just wants to get rid of the parasitic drop without spending thousands of dollars on whatever use cluster and tearing the whole car apart so let's uh let's try making that fuse an accessory power instead of constant battery power so let's first try turning the ignition key on with the radio fuse out and see how this multi-display works so key on the needles do something funky self-calibrate does our multi-display turn on oh right does eventually obviously the radio won't work and we're friday january 1st 1 a.m everything reset so if we go to mode minute so the year is 1999 and i noticed that the maximum year you can put in here is uh see 2015 16 17 18 19. so 2018 is the latest year you can put in here shame on toyota that's planned obsolescence they didn't want you to keep this car longer than 20 years actually if it's a 2002 longer than like 17 years and you can't even put in the right year boo so i guess you know the the date you can't set uh appropriately anyways but that's that's how the cluster behaves with that fuse out if we turn it off you see the basically the needles do that weird reset and the screen comes on late okay so let's pull that fuse it's out right now and give this fuse a power when the accessory position is on instead of constant battery power now where do we find an accessory power here back to our wiring diagram ignition key so an accessory and on we have these four fuses cigarette lighter srs accessory ecu accessory and power outlet let's go for the cigarette lighter fuse we'll pull that out figure out which pin is hot an accessory and just just jump that to to our radio fuse output pin okay okay so using a test light to battery ground first in the radial fuse slot let's figure out which pin is hot at all times it's the upper pin so the lower pin will go to the radio and the multi display i pulled the sig lighter fuse and this one when the key is an accessory the top pin will be hot and this one goes to our cigarette lighter so we want to jump this top pin to that bottom pin as an experiment if i turn the key down off the top pin loses power okay so let's jump those two and see how stuff behaves and look at our parasitic draw which right now is 18 milliamps okay so jumper is installed to refuse let's turn the key to accessory okay our gauges obviously reset since they didn't have constant battery power the cd changer does its thing we can turn on our radio now and let's uh i don't know if it'll keep its memory presets i doubt it [Music] so four is 105.9 you turn the key to it on then you know that comes on everything's good everything's happy let's turn the key off take it out and look at our parasitic draw it should go down back to less than 20 milliamps okay so in half a minute we're back down to 17 milliamps so that is a viable solution if we can somehow get that power and put it to that pin you know through a 15 amp fuse so the only drawbacks are you lose your radio presets and you lose your time on your fancy display customer setting you'd be more than happy with that instead of installing a battery kill switch um i guess the needles will do their little reset thing when you turn the key on but that's what the customer wants that's what we're going to do so let's find out create an elegant way because i don't want to tear the whole dash apart i just want to do all the wiring right here at the fuse box to do this permanently okay so here's the game plan i want to install this fuse holder so this is going to be our new radio fuse this pin i'm going to trim down so i just basically cut it in half so we'll stick this in the feed to the radio and the cluster and this end is going to be tied to an accessory power coming from the cigarette lighter fuse so i have to figure out how to adapt this to that pin while still having the cigarette lighter fuse in there i was thinking maybe solder on you know solder this to a leg of a fuse and just shove it in there because otherwise you have to run a jumper and then another fuse holder this is going to be messy i just want to make this clean and still usable um you know i guess we'll uh we'll go with a path of least resistance all right so here's the final solution so this end is just a trimmed uh male connector crimped onto the piece holder that's going to go to our radio pin and then this is our cigarette lighter fuse so i just soldered on the strands right there and that's the accessory power feed so this still fits and it'll still feed our cigarette lighter so let's see if it works turn on our meter here's our key so our needles do their reset radio obviously doesn't keep its presets but they weren't there to begin with and make sure our cigarette lighter works i don't know where that is oh there we go let's see if that heats up so that's the final fix key off yarn this has to reset but the screen will come on eventually even though it won't be very useful because all this stuff resets but at least you can see your outside temperature and final check here with the key off what is our parasitic draw let's wait for that to time out okay 17 milliamps so customer approved the repair we'll leave it like that and that's it thanks a lot for watching we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Pine Hollow Auto Diagnostics

Views: 121,211

Keywords: Toyota, battery, draw, current, drain, fuse, voltage, cluster, display, radio, power

Id: bS6xak6Xmyo

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022