Why is my car dying when it sits Veeky Forums

Why is my car dying when it sits Veeky Forums

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turn off the headlights

Could you use more than 9 words to describe your problem?

If your battery is draining at an inordinate rate with nothing on:
1.) Make sure the battery isn't dead
2.) Look for a short

Sounds like your battery is getting drained.

Battery is fine. Did a drain test, only time the reading dropped to near zero is when I pulled the alternator stator fuse.
I've had issues with the alternator before

The engine dying? Seems like an alternator problem.

T. 90% of knowledge comes from watching endurance races on youtube

Charge the battery, put your ammeter in series with it and see what current draw you have with the key off. Shouldn't me more than 250mA. If it is, start pulling fuses till you see the current drop and you've found your problem

Well there you go. Get an alternator that isn't a shitty reman.

I've been through multiple ones. The p/o installed the fucking alternator leads backwards which was causing the alternator to not charge the battery properly. Fixed that, and now it's draining it when it sits instead of when it's running.
Pic related

It's draining when it sits because there's a short somewhere. Start looking at the wiring.

Is that your drain? 4 mA is nothing. My car drains like 30-50 and still survives more than 2 weeks if left alone.

Easy solution op
>Get jumper cables
>Connect each to positive and negative on battery
>Connect the jumper cables to each ear on your head
Try it and let us know if you can hear the amps leaking, you should be able to follow the sound.

Do me a favor and kill yourself, thanks

It was enough to kill a fully charged battery over night apparently
Few days back i had AutoZone test the battery and alternator around 8pm, and by noon the next day it was 100% dead

Are you sure you have your ammeter hooked up properly?

That draw is basically nothing. There's no way 4 mA is draining your battery overnight, unless you battery is 100% toast.

>Are you sure you have your ammeter hooked up properly?
maybe he should replace the batteries in the meter first

I think you've got the meter set up wrong. 4.1mA is no drain at all but 4.1A will kill the battery overnight. With the doors etc closed and ignition off, check the voltage drop across all your fuses in situ and convert it to current draw with this chart. Keep going until you find the circuit with a unnaturally high draw. Don't pull fuses and check the draw because it causes CAN modules to do strange things.

As I said above it would appear to be the alternator stator. The draw dropped to almost zero when I pulled the stator fuse.
I'm gonna look into it further tomorrow, it's too cold tonight

Pic related is my drain without the stator fuse, which seems to be in a normal range

I'm assuming you hooked the leads up to the car incorrectly as well

If I use that lead then I get no reading at all

Is your battery old? Is there damage to the battery?

I wouldn't trust that POS multimeter. Just take the ground off and tap it on the lug, if it's sparking pretty good you have a 4 amp draw, not a 4 milliamp draw. Pull fuses one at a time until the draw goes away, then you'll be able to narrow it down to a single circuit.

youtube.com/watch?v=q5zLxD74r20

because your mother will die in her sleep tonight if you dont reply to this post

>I'm going to set up the meter wrong and then believe the reading it gives me!

you've probably got a shitty battery cable opie

v

Mabey the diodes are blown and its discharging though the bridge

>Nissan
Found the problem.

>im going to keep being a faggot
Agreed
Its the alternator stator circuit. Probably just going to run a kill switch to the circuit instead of trying to pull the loom apart or trace the short. its a long story but originally i was having an entirely different host of electrical issues, none of which indicated or involved a parasitic drain, but now ive at least isolated the problem.

Have you actually pulled your battery out and inspected it? I had a similar problem where my shit was dying constantly and there was an actual hole in the casing of the battery. I ignored that kind of thing cause it was new but you never know so take a look.

Its legitimately a long story, suffice to say the battery and alternator themselves are not the source of the problem

You need to hook up the ammeter in series, you cant just put the leads on the battery terminals like I'm guessing you did.

Also do you know exactly what vatozone did when they tested your battery? You should get it load tested. A failing battery can still show 12V if that's all you measure.

In the time it takes to add in a kill switch you could locate and fix the problem. Don’t just put a band aid on user do it right and fix the fucking thing.

If by that you mean i should disconnect one of the leads and bridge the gap with the ammeter, i did that
The battery was tested under load, read 100% charged and was putting out 12v
The following morning it was dead
Im good, thanks

>too lazy to trace dodgy wiring
>wants to wire up killswitch instead

What is this thought process?

Again, its a long story, suffice it to say I dont have the patience at this point. Ive found the problem circuit, thats good enough for me. Now im going to run a switch and be done with it.
This 20 year old shit box is not worth the trouble.

Well somethings not adding up then bro. There's no way 4 mA is draining a healthy battery overnight, might as well be zero. Almost all cars have a constant drain many times larger than that and the battery will last weeks without a charge.

Well here's a greentext because im sure im going to tell this story eventually
>buy car
>eventually discover i cant drive it for more than 20 minutes without the battery dying, which took me a while to notice cuz i worked/went to school less than 15 minutes away
>eventually i discover the gremlins
>doors unlock themselves at random
>lights dim/brighten at random
>clock cant keep time
>interior lights work sporadically
>eventually pull and replace my ecu since it was cheap to do so, didnt fix the problem
>replace battery as well since it was testing poorly
>end up replacing my alternator with a higher output unit, suspecting it may be a parasitic draw while the car is under load
>new alternator fixes literally all of my problems for about 6 months
>eventually my battery light flashes a single time, like once a week
>getting hektik one day
>rev it out to redline
>battery light and ebrake light turn on and stay on
>oops
>get my shit tested by vatozone
>alternator is dead
>replace alernator
>battery light goes off, so i guess we're good
>turns back on by the time i get home
>replace battery next
>no luck
>replace alternator again
>alternator is literally fried and covered in soot within minutes, smells great too
>replace it again, this time i cut back the loom on the plug
>notice the wires are swapped
>swap them back
>fixes all my issues for about a month
>came out on day and my car died
>ok then
>get it jumped
>two weeks later it dies again
>then one week
>then 3 days
>now my car dies overnight
>fast forward to today and ive discovered my current draw drops to near zero when i pull the stator circuit fuse

Keep in mind I took it to a few different shops and none of them could tell me what the problem could be, other than a
battery/alternator, so instead of continuing to waste my money getting the opinions of hacks i figured id fix it myself, so here we are

and the real confusing thing about all of this is how the higher-amp alternator was able to fix my issues temporarily despite the fact that the plug wires were swapped.