Why Does My Battery Keep Dying? - Parasitic Draw Test and Fix - Operation Cheap Jeep

hey guys it's Matt with YouTube channel bleep in Jeep today I want to talk to you about parasitic drawl but then I want to go a little bit further a lot of channels out there they have videos on parasitic draw but they stop once they find the problem I want to go into it a little more in-depth after we figure out the problem and see what you can do about it so if you're having this problem usually it's going to manifest itself in a dead battery it seems like no matter what you do you can charge it a hundred times but it always ends up dead a few days later and usually what that means is you have a bad battery you have a bad alternator or you have a parasitic draw and what a parasitic draw means is just that either there's a short and the wire somewhere or there's something on that you don't know about that's pulling amperage from the battery and killing it over a period of time so if you're watching this video I'm going to assume that it is a parasitic draw and that you do have a good battery and a good alternator to start with the way you want to check your battery is get a voltmeter put it on DC volts 20 and we're going to check the battery should be around twelve point six or above that's a good battery so make sure you have a good battery to start that it's fully charged that your alternator is good of course and then you want to go ahead and check your battery cable terminals so you want to check the cables make sure there's no corrosion and make sure you clean them up good because sometimes you will have a no start issue and it's just the battery terminals are gross and disgusting and it's not getting a good connection between the post and the terminal so make sure that's good the next thing that we're going to do is turn your multimeter to amps so right here you'll see 10 amps it's handy if you have a multi meter that has milliamps as well if you have a very small draw but this one will work and then we're going to pull this usually have to pull the red wire and put it over on a different setting for the amps now on the leads it's going to be handy if you have something like alligator clamps or a partner to help hold these but the collapse will help you can do it yourself so the next step is to take the negative battery terminal and pull it off of the post and just set it aside so the next step is real important when we connect these to the negative post here and the negative terminal everything that your car is doing is going to be running through this little wire so you want to make sure that all the lights are off the headlights are off the door is closed because when your door is open what comes on the lights come on you don't want that to happen so either close your door or tape off the little sensor that turns the lights on so inside the door they'll usually be a little latch and you can tape that closed do whatever you have to do to turn everything off before you connect this up and make sure that once you do connect this up that you do not open the door turn on the lights try to start the car anything like that okay so right away you can see a number shows up here and we're on the 10 amp scale and we're reading 0.76 0.75 so what that means is that something is drawing power from the battery you don't want this number to be anything over 50 milliamps so on this scale that would be point zero five and we're at point seven five so there's something drawing power and that's going to kill the battery in just a couple days if not faster so the next thing we need to do is move over to the fuse panel inside the vehicle but here's a handy little trick since I've got these long leads on here I can take this and put it on the window that way I can see it from inside I don't have to get out and come around every time so the next step is to find your fuse panel a lot of times that's going to be underneath your feet somewhere by the dash and figure out where that is I've got a light in here so hopefully you can see what I'm doing so all we need to do now is come in here and start pulling fuses one by one and every time we pull a fuse go ahead and look at the meter and see if it changed see if it went down to zero just keep doing that one by one until you find something now keep in mind there's also fuses inside the engine bay sometimes sometimes you'll have more than one fuse panel as well so did you see that when I pulled that fuse right there engage went down to zero meter went to zero check it out again so there's our problem okay so you may be asking yourself what do I do now well the next thing you should do is take the little cover a lot of times on the cover it'll tell you what the fuse is for so if you look here the one that we pulled that helped us out it's number seven cluster so in my case that doesn't really help me a lot but let's say you had one that said cigarette lighter well in that case you know that maybe your cigarette lighter is bad or it could be the wire leading to your cigarette lighter is shorted out somewhere so if it did say cigarette lighter on here you would want to either replace the cigarette lighter or trace the wiring to the cigarette lighter and figure out where your short is another thing might be the dome lights maybe there's a radio so if it was the radio fuse you could go and check the radio maybe your head unit was bad maybe the wiring to the radio was bad in my case the cluster doesn't really tell me a whole lot so what do I do now so what did I do next well the main thing you need to figure out is what does that fuse control so I just used the handy-dandy internet typed-in what does number seven fuse do on a 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee now you could also use something like a Haynes manual or you could use a subscription to all data to figure this out as well it turns out that the number seven fuse controls the body control module I didn't really know much about that so I typed in what does the body control module do on a 98 Grand Cherokee well it turns out that the body control module controls a whole lot of things so it controls the gauges it tells the dome lights when to cut on and when to cut off it tells the wipers when to cut on when it's raining it tells the temperature outside and a lot of the functions that that on the gauges that you see lighting up and stuff like that and the different controls for when to shut on and off lights after you've left the vehicle say for 15 minutes and you've left your headlights on and those shut off the body control module controls that so really it didn't help me at all because there's no way I can check all of those things to figure out which one is causing the problem or where the shortest so what did I do next come here and I'll show you okay we're back here looking at the fuse panel again I know that this is my problem fuse right here there's something going on on the other side of that views I know that each one of these fuses is connected to a bundle of these wires so this fuse controls a bundle of these wires somewhere so I've still got my meter hooked up and it's still showing that it's pulling amperage from somewhere so the next thing that I did was I came in here and I just grabbed these bundles there's a little clip on them and if you pull them just right you can pull one of these out of here okay [Music] okay so I pulled that out I look at my meter it's still showing that it's drawing so I know that's not the one so what I did I just went around pulling each one of these until I finally found the problem one and it happens to be this one right here so when I pull this guy out it goes back down to zero so I know that it's somewhere in these bundle of wires whatever these bundle of wires are controlling that's where my problem is somewhere down the line from here okay so once again you could probably look this up somewhere and figure out which where each one of these wires is going and then you could go test each one of those things so let's say this was your headlights you could go check to make sure there wasn't a short in your headlight and let's say this one was your dome light you could go check all your dome lights and go see if there was a short or maybe a bad dome light causing your problem I didn't want to have time for that so let me show you what I did so how this bundle pulled out my leader still hooked up and my meter is reading zero now because whatever it is is disconnected when I pull this out so on the backside of here there's some little female and ends and then male pin ends on the other side so I just made me a little tool it took some alligator wires here put a nail in one side and the other side has alligator clip I'm going to test each one of these so find the pin number one over here and we're going to plug it in to the corresponding pin so when you would plug this in it would go into this pin right here and you want to like that now I'm going to look at my meter if my meter shows that I'm drawing amperage when I do that I know that's the wire that's not the one so we're going to move it over to the next one put the pin in here no drill I'm going to keep doing that okay check it out that one right there when I look at my meter there's my draw so that wire right there is the one that's controlling whatever it is that's broken so it's that purple wire right here now I could look this up on the computer somewhere figure out what that purple wire controls and go and fix it another option and what I did was I just chose to cut the wire and you want to cut the wire it went away and problem solved now of course if that wire controlled something important you would have to go back and fix it now in my case I'm pretty sure not positive I couldn't figure out what that wire controls but I'm pretty sure that wire that I cut too controls something that tells when my back hatch is open so the reason I was having all these problems is that the computer thought my back hatch was open and it kept on trying to send that information to me and flash some lights and tell me that my back hatch was open even when the car and the vehicle was off I was never getting that signal up here and the control module thingamabob err but I'm pretty sure that's what it was and I'm pretty sure I don't need that I'm pretty sure I can figure out if my back hatch is open or not all on my own so just cutting that wire solved my problem now if that wire was something important like you know your fuel pump or something like that obviously you're going to have to patch that wire back together and go figure out the problem somewhere down the line but it could be that this wire is shorted somewhere along one and it's not really practical to follow these wires all the way through the hole - you'd have to tear this whole car apart to figure out where that wire is shorted but it also could be the end so maybe the little sensor that tells me that the door is open and closed on the back hatch is shorted out somehow but in my case I'm just going to leave it like that not worry about it again this is the cheep cheep by the way so cheep six I'm glad that's over so I kind of figured it out now the previous owner had pulled all of the dome lights out and I was wondering why would they do that but I think I figured it out now if that sensor back there was bad and it was saying that the back hatch was open all the time that would have kept the dome lights on killing the battery now it still killed the battery after a few days and I'm thinking that's because the back hatch being open or it thinking it being open was telling the computer to let me know and flashing lights or ding or chirp or whatever that the back hatch was open even though that wasn't happening up here it's complicated lots of computers I hate computers but anyway I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you learned something if you did give me a thumbs up subscribe tell your buddies I appreciate it we'll see you next time it's matt with bleepin jeep bye

Channel: BleepinJeep

Views: 984,971

Rating: 4.9013958 out of 5

Keywords: alternator, parasitic draw, bleepinjeep, cheap jeep, battery goes dead, xj, short, battery, how to see if you have a short, low battery, battery drain, how to diagnose a short, 4x4, wrangler, parasitic draw test, why does my battery keep dying, battery dies overnight, jeep, operation cheap jeep, jeep wrangler, cherokee, battery test, how to find a short, dead battery, repair, generator, change alternator, alternator replacement, replace alternator

Id: q5zLxD74r20

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2017