deathrunner

What is an acceptabel amount of draw?

The Deathrunner has been sitting for about 2 months and the battery drained. I have never had problems before. It is an Optima Red top so they put it on the Charger for 6 hours and it is all good now.

But, before I put it back on, I want to make sure nothing is draining it.

I put my digital multy meter on it and it keeps climbing and then it switches and keeps dropping. I need to get my old school unti out.

What do I want to see and What do I definitely not wnat to see?

deathrunner

Ok, I dide some more searching on here.

4Crawler suggest no more than 20-30ma draw. Good to know. So, armed with that knowledge, I went at the truck with my old meter (Micronta).

I took off the positive cable and put the meter on the 500ma setting. It pegged it. WTF?

So I put my newer Automatic meter on it and it shows nothing. Which do I believe? I really doubt my draw is more than 500ma, it took over a month to drain it.

I doubt it is 0, as that is lower than normal and I do have a clock, stereo, cb, cpu using the battery as a "memory"

Any Suggestions?

deathrunner

Breaking News!

I know everyone is sitting on the edge of thier seats for this......


I made a test light out of some wire and a spare reverse bulb.

I put it between the + and - Posts and it comes on.....so I know it works.

I disconnect the positive terminal and put it between the cable and post and no light.

So I am going to assume that my newer meter is correct and that there is no draw.

My old meter must be retarded.

Anything else to check? What would cause a battery to drain with no draw...especially the MAGNIFICIENT RED TOP?

HAVOC

To ckeck for draw : make sure NOTHING is on, doors are shut and the key is out of the ignition. Disconnect the NEG terminal, black lead from multimeter goes to battery terminal, and red lead goes to battery cable. You make all your connections on the negative side.

Mattabilly

I don't know if this is true but I've heard parking on concrete for extended periods has a tendency to drain batteries. Now before I get flamed for this, I've never checked the validity of this. However my brother used to have a lowrider show car with a two pump hydraulic setup using two Optima Redtops. When he didn't drive it he unhooked the positive terminal. Even while doing this he still lost most of the charge after about two weeks. Just some personal experience with Redtops draining.

Dublin

Placing a battery on concrete doesn't do anything to the battery in terms of draining the charge, I don't know where these goofy ideas come from. The battery case and contents don't interact so why would the "non-conductive case allow tranfer between the contents and concrete, besides steel is a much better conductor and your batterys surrounded by a lot of that. So now we know this is an impossibility something to be aware of is an un-used battery will slowly lose charge over time no matter how expensive or powerful. The biggest causes of battery failure besides age is lack of use and insufficient charge rate (alt, reg, connections, ect). Sorry for the rambling, but the battery/concrete thing drives me nuts.

HAVOC

The idea of a battery "losing charge" when on concrete is false. The cold floor would infact make the battery cold, weakening it's cranking ability. I guess no one put 1 and 1 together back then.
As far as the lowrider's battery dying, I would think the RUBBER tires do a real good job of insulating.

deathrunner

I'll try on the negative side, although I'm not sure how taht would differentiate the draw. I've seen a couple sources that say to do it on the positive side.

Worth a shot. Thanks for the ideas.

frodin1

Dont forget treating a Redtop like a marine battery will kill it for sure. These batteries are not meant to be discharged multiple times, like draining with your stereo. You need a Yellow for that! With a decent meter it really doesnt matter. If your backwards it'll just show you a reversed polarity. Meaning on the screen it'll show - 12.3 instead of + 12.3 I personally like to check systems with an amp clamp because it'll show the amount of draw in amps and how close it gets to what the fuse rating is? If you have a 30 amp fuse it shouldn't be pulling 29 amps. If your that close you got issues!

deathrunner

What fuse are you talking about. I can measure amps with my multimeter.

frodin1

All your fuses.

deathrunner

So you're saying to check teh draw on every fuse?

frodin1

Sure you can if you wanted too. Each one is a seperate system.

4Crawler

iTrader: (3)

You can just pull each fuse and not the current draw with each removal. This way you can identify the circuits with the highest current drain and see if anything needs further looking into. When I was having discharge problems, it was due to a radio that I had wired into constant power. Seems that when it's main power was on all the time, the radio pulled ~40-50mA when off. When I switched that main power connected to a switched circuit, it dropped to almost nothing.

Note that a ~40mA drain equates to ~1AH (Amp Hour) of drain per day and with most batteries, if you drain ~1/2 of their capacity they are usually dead enough to cause starting problems. In my case, I had a 26AH battery and 2 weeks of parking was enough to pull it down to not start. Luckily that was a deep cycle battery and I had dual batteries, so I just flipped a switch to start off the 2nd battery and it was no problem. I now added a solar battery charger on my truck to keep it topped off while parked. Seems to work great.

deathrunner

Mine is saying no draw at all, according to my meter. The test light doesn't even come on at all. Is that possible.

I figure teh cpu and my clock memory would draw something. But it reads nothing. How can I test to make sure my meter is working properly?

Do I have to test on teh negative side for sure? Only heard that once.

4Crawler

iTrader: (3)

You can test on either battery terminal, meter between the post and the end of the cable. Test light will only light up if you have a very large draw, one that is high enough to make the light bulb light. With the meter, you need to be on the current/amps scale and often that also entails moving the red plug to a different terminal:
- http://www.4crawler.com/4x4/CheapTri...oUseAnOhmMeter

Like on mine, I need to move the red plug from DC Volts over to the amps/ohms jack:



Measuring current is a little tricky, if you don't have a good connection, the current will read low or zero. And be sure to start on the highest amp range then move to a lower range if needed. Also, check the fuse in the meter (if present), it may have popped if you momentarily ran too much current through it. Fuse will pop and the meter will just read 0.00 (because no current is flowing due to the burned out fuse).

1eye

The way 4Crawler has it set up works ok, But, its usually better to use a "clip-on" amp meter. Couple of reason, 1: you do not have to disturbe any wires or unhook anything that could reset a defective electronic component that is causing the draw. 2: most high end clip-on Amp meter I've seen have a higher max limit on them and most just go to a "Err" reading if you exceed that limit, so you do not have to replace a fuse in the meter each time.

Depending on the make/model of vehicles, many new ones will continue to draw several amps for up to almost a hour after they have been shut off. I've found its best to wait until the computer has "gone into sleep mode" and then start my testing. Set it up so you can get at the fuse box and any power feeds/fuse to any accessorys that U have wired in. { door open for access, but door switch held in/pinned closed works best} Clip onto either battery lead with the meter and see what you get. Any excessive draw showing on the meter can then be traced by pulling fuses or unplugging accessorys one at a time. Good luck. 1eye.

1eye

And about a battery going dead if you sit it on the floor is a bit of a "Urben Legend". That said and before the "flamming" gets going. What I'm referring to is many years ago { yea, when dirt was young} the battery casings where not made out of plastic. Many batterys casings where made out of some type of material that ressembled a hard rubber. [the name of it escapes me, old age?lol] If you put these old style battery onto a cool damp concrete floor it would tend to draw out the charge in the batterys a little faster. This was told to me by one of my instructors at Tech school years ago. [and he WAS as old as dirt, lol] If your plastic cased "new style" battery goes dead when its just sits on the floor not hooked up, its probably got a lose plate in it or the plates are starting to "sulphate" up.

deathrunner

I bet I blew a fuse. The draw can't be more than 500ma....could it?

Like I said on my older meter, it was pegging the 500ma setting. Nuts!

4Crawler

iTrader: (3)

Does not take much to hit 500mA, a 6 watt bulb will do that. I had that happen in my 4Runner. My on-board welder control box somehow got switched on and the red indicator light was draining my battery in about a week.

If the current it really high, pull all the fuses first and then put one at a time back in and see where it jumps up. I use my $3.00 Harbor Freight meter for testing current, it has a 10 amp scale (actually goes up to 19.99 amps).

And yes a clamp-on ammeter is a sweet setup, but for DC current, you need to make sure and get a hall-effect probe so that you can measure DC amps. The low cost clamp-on meters often only work on AC circuits.