Parasitic battery drain!

[firewalk]

So I’ve been having this parasitic battery drain for some time now. I’m geting tired (and broke) of replacing batteries all the time. When ever I install a brand new and fully charged battery, it will be flat after 5-6 days at most.

So I bought a “prioritystart battery protector” which goes between the battery and the positive cable. Whenever the battery goes bellow 11,7 volts for more than 1 minutte it will disconnect power totally, thus ensuring that there is always enough power to start the car.

This actually works. However, My batteries still keep dying! My battery which was brand new 2 months ago now won’t hold a charge. It will start the car, but a few hours after parking the car it will read only 11,87 volts.

So the question is:

1: Will a battery die from geting drained down to 11,7 volts? I know they will die from geting flat. But 11,7 is far from flat?..

I know that in order to search for the problem you are supposed to set up the multimeter between the negative terminal on the battery and the negative cable, measuring amps. Then you remove the fuses one by one. I’ve don this. The only problem is that in my case it seems like EVERY darn thing is phulling amps to some degree! Even hours after parking the car.

I will typically phull one fuse, and it will decrease the load by a few miliamps.. Then I phull another one and it goes down by a few more miliamps. Seems like I have to phull nearly every darn fuse to get it to go down to aceptable levels. So as you can imagine, problemsolving this isn’t easy :unsure: Nor can I just replace the entire wiring. And I can’t drive around with no fuses, as nothing would work!

Any Ideas? I was hoping the prioritystart would get me around the problem. Could it just be a bad battery from the dealer? Or are they simply not designed to widhstand beeing drained down to 11,7 volts, then started and charged up to 12,6 again.. ?

I need some advice! This is eating at me.. ::(

Topic

[firewalk]

I still haven’t been able to pinpoint the source.
I feel I’ve spent way to much time on this allready and I guess I could search for days or even weeks and still not figure it out. At least I got the drain down from 160 miliamps to about 80 miliamps.
I’m just going to rewire the circuit so that it get ignition power instead of continuous power, using a relay and install a bypass switch just in case I need the hazzard lights with ignition off.

Good thing though, I figured out the oil pressure lamp problem. The combinationmeter / gauge cluster had a faulty leed on the circuitboard, causing switched +12v not geting to several bulbs. Fixed that, so now at least that works. 🙂

And I took advantage of the oportunity to better sound-insulate the interiour of the car since I had all the carpets and such out anyways. Should be a more plesant ride from now on. 🙂
So at least something good came of all this. 🙂

[EricTheCarGuy]

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[EricTheCarGuy]

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