Please let me start by saying I know there is tons of information already out on the forum about parasitic draw and i have read a very good portion of them on top of watching YouTube videos about it. I am posting today because I saw something a little unique, I think, and I wanted to see if maybe another member has come across this. This morning I connected my ammeter in series with the negative cable as I wanted to see if I have a high parasitic draw or if my battery is not good because after two weeks of not starting, the information for Fuel in the DIC will be clear and I can hear it struggle a little to crank. I closed all the latches manually (so I could keep the doors and hood open) and then locked the car via remote and set a timer. In roughly 5 minutes, my draw from the battery was bouncing between 20 and 30 milliamps, I was happy with that for sure. Anyway i left everything as is and came back to the car at the 15 minute mark and meter was reading 240 milliamps (.24). I thought to myself, did I read the meter wrong? So I did it again. I opened everything up, closed everything down, locked via remote. I set a 15 min timer and stayed with the car this time; again within the first 5 I saw the current draw go 20 to 30 milliamps however at around the 13 min mark the draw jumped up 240. Since I only have one multimeter, I disconnected from the negative cable, reconnected the battery and repeated the process to open everything and close everything so I could start measuring for voltage drop. I waited 15 minutes before I started, time to let the draw increase, and measured voltage drops on every fuse that had power to it with the key off; I measured a 0.5mv drop on fuse 24 and 0.4mv drop on fuse 29, everything else was 0.2/0.1mv therefore nothing that I can see real excessive for the in cabin fuse block, the was nothing over 0.1mv in the fuse block under the hood. I reconnected the ammeter as I planned to pull fuse 24 and 29 to see if my draw would drop back to 20 to 30ma, after going to 240, however this time the draw I was measuring never went above 30ma and I let set for over 30 minutes and this time it never jumped up to 240ma. Has anyone seen anything like this?

Sorry to be long winded but I like to provide as much detail as possible.

Thanks all.

 

How long it takes cars to go to sleep is dependent on the make and manufacturer. Chasing parasitic draws can be a pain in the *** and time consuming but these cars really never go to sleep sleep. I will save you some time chasing though...ITS PROBABLY THE POWER SEATS!!! Another fella posted here a few weeks back and I said check the power seats. Low and behold...it was the power seats. That's not to say thats all it can be...but 8/10 times...that's where I always begin troubleshooting a parasitic draw. Sucks in these cars cause you essentially gotta take the seat out but that's where I would look. Have a fresh top'ed up battery...and whatever circut you think is the offender, take it out the loop and measure your volt drop over 24 hour period.

 

I would wait at least 30 minutes to read your current draw and make sure the battery is fully charged at 12.66 volts before testing...also if you are doing the voltage drop method which is the preferred method vs. pulling fuses you should see 0.00 on your DVOM if there is no current flow so maybe you need new DVOM leads...it helps to know what year car you have so it's a good idea to fill out your profile with year, mods, tune, trans etc...if fuse 24 is an issue that is the Bose Amplifier and fuse 29 is the courtesy lamp and it also goes to pin 16 of the DLC...do you have any aftermarket junk plugged into the DLC ???...that is where you plug a scan tool into...don't know how old your battery is so you may want to have it load tested.

 

Thank you everyone for the info. I will definitely take a look at the power seats. I also turned off the twilight option as I remember reading somewhere that it can be problematic. Just to be clear on my readings, everything that I mentioned that had a 0.1 or 0.2mv reading would flash that value then drop to zero (some read zero right away); the only fuses that kept a voltage drop reading (did not flash a value and then drop to zero) were 24, 29 and 5 reading 0.5mv, 0.4mv and 0.3mv respectively. I did perform a load test on the battery today and it did register slightly in the weak zone even though the battery is only 1.5 years old. However, it is an AGM battery and before I was familiar with this style of battery, this battery had been drained a couple times to point where the car would not turn over and it is my understand a major drain like this (below 50% charge) can damage these AGM batteries.

I did come across something else today, not sure if it is related or not. I noticed my under hood light not working, I pulled the bulb and it looked fine, even ohmed out fine. I thought maybe it was not making a good connection, I reinstalled it and still no light. I checked across it and I have 12.5 volts. I pulled the bulb and connected an external power supply to it and it lights up but does not turn off when you move the bulb horizontal like it supposed to. I was watching a video on this and they stated to check fuse 2, even though I have 12 volts. I didn't have any voltage drop across fuse 2 but the weird thing is when I measure the voltage on either side of the fuse (fuse to ground), I only get 9.98vdc, whereas all the other measure 12.5vdc, as I would expect. It sounds like something running on fuse 2 is drawing down the voltage, I just don't know what at this point. Again, I had no kind of voltage drop when I measure across the fuse so i don't know if this is a contributor or not.

My car is basically all stock expect for a catback and the car has the stock tune. The car is a '99 (I will get the profile filled out). I have nothing connected to the OBDII plug. I have a bluetooth device for the Bose stereo that is powered by fuse 11, I believe, but I had this drain before I installed this device, I have just started looking into this.