How to Find a Parasitic Battery Drain!!!

all right so here's I went we were just cruising right along smooth sailing through life with no issues as usual and then the wife says the truck seemed a little bit strange because we drive that vehicle every day and it's rare that thing just dies overnight so I was concerned that there was a parasitic draw but did my due diligence charge the battery even replaced the battery it was under warranty he took it in and it had zero cranking amps on the load test and completely dead exchange it under the warranty and then put it in same thing next day battery was dead I was able to recharge it this time but now I know I have a parasitic drain so I'm gonna go through the process of what I did to show you guys how I found it and a few things that are different than other parasitic drain videos so if I would have just followed the steps in those videos I would have been chasing my tail for days and never found my issue and no you don't have to pull the entire engine harness out of the car this is for a swap project if you like engine swaps be sure to subscribe if I had to add anything to start us off in the beginning it would be to be very patient you need to be patient and wait and a lot of times if you're like pulling fuses out you put a fuse back in it may cycle power to something and then you're starting the process of the body control module going back to sleep again so you may have to wait for a couple minutes as you'll see in the video that I'll start at 1 amp rating and then it slowly starts to drop as things are turning off so you have like your dome lights and other things going on so just be patient and give it time everything needs to go to sleep keep all the doors shut as much as you can I was checking I will end up checking inside the fuse panel inside the vehicle so what I did in that situation was I would pull a fuse come out shut the door and then start the process over it takes a little bit longer but I wanted to just see if everything is in a normal situation like miss me opening and closing the door and what is gonna happen so that's what I'm doing hopefully it helps you I want to make sure you have a digital multimeter that reads amps this through reads milliamps and up to 10 amps so if I want to read 10 amps it has to go on this side so the lead needs to come over to here this will read milliamps with it on this side but we're gonna be drawing current in excess of 6 amps for sure so I'm going to switch this thing over to the 10 amp side so I know it'll fry 2 meter these I refused that these do go bad so make sure if you go from reading amps to measuring say battery voltage again switch this thing around otherwise you're gonna short this thing out and fry it all right so to hook up the multimeter we're gonna unhook the negative on the battery and I always hope unhook the negative you should some say you're supposed to do it on the positive but I like to do it on the negative because if you have anything connected to the positive on the battery then you touch it to anything grounded in the vehicle you're gonna create some sparks so I like to use the negative I feel it's a little bit safer so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure that my multimeter is set up in the right setting it's gonna be set on the amp setting the left side is 4 amps I can run milliamps on this side it shows but we're gonna have a pretty large draw over 10 amps so we're gonna do it that way so the way you're gonna do it is just basically hook this up in series with the battery so I'm gonna take the negatively I'm gonna hook it up to the negative terminal on the battery I'm just gonna rest it here basically here I'm just gonna balance it on there then I'll take the positive and I'm gonna hook it up to the wire that was connected to the battery just by hooking it up underneath this rubber boot here you could use a clamp or whatever you wanted but as long as you have a reading you're basically going in series from the negative to the multimeter over to the wire that was hooked up to the negative and now you'll have a current draw and you'll see that it's higher rating right now and then it'll eventually trickle down because basically what we did was we could reconnected the battery to the computer to the vehicle through the multimeter so that's why we see a high current load in the beginning and then it starts to trickle down and it'll eventually shut everything off dome lights will shut off PCM shuts off BCM shuts off everything is going to sleep so now you can see we're reading 243 milliamps so 242 243 milliamps is a larger drain than normal this would take based on the reserve capacity of the battery this would take probably about two weeks to kill the battery if it was off so this is a terrible drain but it's larger than you want to see you'd want to normally see 50 to 60 milliamps max so the normal process of going through and checking for a drain you want to make sure it's hooked up to the battery you're measuring the load and then when you see your current draw here you'd start to go through each fuse on the fuse block and pull the fuse out until you saw a drop in current all right so I pulled my fuse oh now I see that it's back down to its normal normal current draw and now I know that I found my circuit that has the load on it so after that you identify the circuit and start looking into that circuit and see what it could be if it's a dome light it could be power seats it could be any type of a short or a relay you'll have to start investigating that circuit a little bit deeper and figure out what the actual cause is I know that description was kind of vague the intent is to just teach you how so hook it up you find your draw and start unhooking circuits until you determine which circuit has the draw on it then you can look into it staying vague because it could be a number of different issues it could be a stepper motor in your gauge cluster it could be a light that's not turning off relay that stuff but just as a general overview of how to find the circuit that's how you would do it so now a lot of the instruction that you'll see and videos that you'll see out there will say do not open the door or do not turn the key forward while you have your multimeter in line because you can damage the multimeter so in my situation I had to turn the key forward in order to find my issue so when I plug this in this will rest at 19,000,000 switch doesn't show me a problem until I turn my key forward so now I'm going to go to the truck I'll turn the key forward and we'll see what happens okay so I just went and turn the key forward turned it back off shut the door you see a high draw of six amps now it'll fully start to come back down it'll eventually get to about point three point four amps and then it'll come back up to three point six so there you drop down to point four and now comes back up to 3.6 amps so this is my issue and this is only replicatable if you hook the battery up turn the key forward and then turn it back off as if you were driving it and parking it so that's why the normal testing method of just disconnecting the battery and then hooking up the mint the multimeter looking for a draw it doesn't help in this situation because I never would have found it if I didn't turn the key forward now my issue starts and it'll do this over and over and over for hours and it'll kill the battery in about four hours so three point six amps comes down to point four cycles back up to foot three point six and kills the battery so now we got to dig into why this is happening as I was doing this I was going through the normal testing method of pulling H fuse L and I wasn't seeing any difference in how this was reacting but I was seeing a lot of false readings when I pull different fuses out like if I pull this fuse for example we're at three point four now if I pull that fuse oh that's the radio fuse now I see a significant drop in current draw but in the end it really didn't have anything so now it came up to two instead of one point six so this is the radio fuse I'll put the radio fuse back in and then my draw comes back up to three point six but my issue wasn't actually anything to do with the radio so that was actually a false reading so what I had to do was find what I had to pull out of here to make this pattern stop happening where it's going down and coming back up to three point six so that's what I had to do so let's dig for the pattern so this took quite a bit of time to do this but the same thing pulling all the circuits and seeing what is gonna make that pattern stop happening so I'm just gonna tell you guys I went to lb EC to here this is the left bust electrical circuit or something like that basically it powers the fuse box inside on the driver's side under the dash so when I pull that you'll see this pattern change so it'll come down to about 250 milliamps but now it doesn't actually go back up to 3.6 so that tells me that that repetitive pattern in that circuit stops when I pull that one out so now I can dig into that another thing that was kind of tricky and confusing me for a while when I pulled this out the pattern stopped but when I put it back in the pattern didn't start again so the pattern is only going to start again when I turn the key forward and turn it back off then the pattern starts so if I pull this it stops but if I put it back in it doesn't do it again but it still tells me there's an issue with this circuit which is lb EC - this is lb EC - on the diagram left bust electrical center which basically goes to the fuse box inside underneath the dash so you have lb EC 1 + lb EC to these both go to that same fuse block under the dash but they power different circuits so the LBCC 1 circuit is okay lb ec2 is not OK so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna trace this to that fuse block then find out which circuits this is powering so to do that we're gonna remove this fuse and then we're gonna change our multimeter over to the continuity buzzer so I'm gonna switch the lead back over and I'm gonna put it on the little buzzer and what this is gonna do is tell me when the circuit is closed so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take one lead put it on the positive on the battery and then I'm gonna touch the terminals inside where that fuse was okay so the one on the inside closest to me has continuity to the battery and then goes through the fuse so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna use this other terminal the one that doesn't have continuity to the battery and I'm gonna trace that to the fuse box because this is the one that is sending power to the fuse box so the way I'm gonna do that is I'm going to use an alligator clip clip it on to that terminal clip one end on to the multimeter lead I'll leave it on the buzzer and then I'm gonna use this to start probing on the inside of the fuse box under the dash all right so here's the box underneath the dash and I have the lead hooked up to the continuity buzzer from that fuse block so if I start probing around in here some of these fuses are going to ring like this when others aren't so all the ones that ring that buzz I know are connected to that I will be EC to fuse there's one up here there's a couple down here and then one right here so these are all powered by l.b ec2 so now if we go look at what those fuses actually where it was aux power to blocks ECC DDM and PDM are all on that circuit for the elbe ec2 circuit now that we have that identified we can come back over and put the LBCC to fuse back in there and then we'll start to pull those individual fuses on the other panel and see which one is causing our issue so now what we're gonna do is hook a multimeter back up on DC amps set it back up how we had it before and we'll go start pullin fuses and reset it and see which one is causing the issue spoiler alert I'm gonna go right for the DDM fuse driver door module I'm gonna pull that out and I try to do this in one clip forward and back and we'll come out shut the door we're basically gonna start this sequence all over again so we're gonna watch what it comes down to it should come down to about 300 milliamps to 300 milliamps and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna set a timer so I want to show you guys the importance of waiting when you're doing this testing why you should wait be patient so you can verify all right so I always see it dropping down into the 0.4 amp or 400 milli amp range so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to set a timer and I won't make you guys sit through this whole thing but we're gonna set this thing and run it for about five minutes we'll come back in five minutes and see where this thing rests so basically at five minutes that's when most of the BCM should be shut off and we'll get a decent a decent current because if you're looking at four hundred and four hundred milliamps that's still a pretty high draw so you may be chasing your tail looking at other stuff and all you should all you really have to do is wait at that point so instead of waiting the five minutes you could be chasing your tail for hours all right so there we see it come down to 60 milliamps now you can see it was sitting there for a while it took a little longer than five minutes closer to ten so we'll call it ten wait ten minutes and then you'll see it come down to a acceptable range that's within range and then if I let it sit for another hour or two it will actually drop down to 19 million so I did test it yesterday I left the house for a couple hours and came back and it was at 19 so there you go sure enough through the testing we tracked this thing down to the driver door module fuse in the fuse panel and if we go over to the driver door module and we watch see when I lock and unlock the door this thing doesn't move or normally that so there's definitely an issue here so now I can start to look into this because through the testing through the testing what we found we tracked it to here and strangely enough as always on my second day outside troubleshooting that and working on it my wife just happened to mention that the door lock wasn't working so I guess that coats to say like if there's anything odd in your vehicle that's happening and then the next day the battery's dead that could be the cause I don't drive that vehicle I Drive a different one but my wife drives that so it was nice of her to mention it on my second day of troubleshooting it is that the door lock wasn't working but anyways without her mentioning that I still would have been able to track it down using that method to find out exactly where the problem was and what I need to go after fixing so it's gonna take time I guess that's if I had to say anything about doing this it's gonna take time be patient especially with a newer vehicle you have to wait five minutes at least for stuff inside to start shutting off so it looked like I had a 240 milliamp draw there for awhile for five minutes I don't actually have that draw it's just the body control module and stuff inside computer whatever is still on inside the vehicle hasn't gone to sleep yet so you may be chasing your tail for a long time if you're not giving it enough time to actually sit and wait to shut off and go to sleep so 240 million draw I would have been pulling fuses for hours and not seeing any result if I didn't know to wait so what I did do was I fall in the pattern after I cycled the key so what's what's different about this is I had to cycle the key in order to see my problem so if I disconnected the battery and then hook up the multimeter to see the amp drove I didn't see any amp dry sauna lamps and I still chased it in the beginning like pulling all the fuses to see what was going on even though I knew 19 milliamps is more than acceptable but I had to cycle the key to create the problem just like you were driving it and then shutting it off so so that's what I had to do hopefully this video helped you guys you may not have the same problem but you may be able to kind of drill down and find out where the problem is ish let me know what you guys think if like the video be sure to leave a comment I don't typically do how to's like this very much unless there's something that's that come up it's more like playing and modification type stuff so if you like that be sure to subscribe thanks for watching and have a good one [Music]

Channel: a21bravo

Views: 336,593

Rating: 4.881752 out of 5

Keywords: How to find battery drain, Battery dies overnight, Parasitic Battery Drain, How to find parasitic battery drain, Car won't start, How to fix a battery that dies overnight, Escalade, Tahoe, Suburban, Silverado, Mechanic, Fuel pump, How to fix a bad fuel pump, How to fix a car that won't start, battery drain test, realme 2 battery test, realme 2 battery drain test, battery drain, dead battery, battery goes dead

Id: rVScppKsfHs

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/spunjbaf]

Nice. Very interested in lessons like this. Thank you.