New guy here. I have a battery drain on my Ford. I disconnected the negative terminal and put a circuit light between it and the battery - light comes on. I unhooked all the extra connections and narrowed down the problem to the fact that my negative terminal grounds on the engine block, and there's a circuit running from there through my block to my alternator, and back to the positive terminal. So as far as I can figure, I have these options: -insulate the alternator. -relocate the battery ground. Is there any other options? what would the HAMB do?
It is always good to have secondary grounds running from block/trans to frame, body to frame as well as the common battery to block hookup. As my Grandpa used to say "You can't ever have too much ground." He probably wasn't speaking electronically but it fits.
hook up a multimeter to the disconnected termanal and the empty post and read the volts if its on like 5 to 12 you may have something on in the car (like on On) if a light bulb or something like that is on and gives a continuos drain it should show up and will read on a meter the way i before mentioned .. check it out hope this helped good luck
what i mentioned befor BTW is in the case that if the problem just showed up and it was not doing this before .... just thought it would be worth checking
Well I took the alternator down to the parts store and sure enough, it was bad. Just got the new one back on and retested....I still get a light.
Leave the light hooked up and pull a fuse at a time. Hopefully when you pull the right fuse the light will go out. Then you have to find the problem in that circuit.
Silly Question, but do you have a clock, radio, tape / cd player hooked up that is a constant but small drain on your battery? then follow the advice given by 325w. |If you have a short somewhere the fuse should blow.
OOPS a fault in the car alarm assuming you have one fitted could also be a small drain on the battery. The favorite with my european Ford was the Trunk light Switching on and off of its own accord, dodgy switch but being intermittent it took ages to find.
My roadster had a persistent and hard-to-find charging problem. Finally fixed it by making the battery ground better. It sounds like you probably have that well in hand, so the diodes in the alternator are probably a good place to start. Good luck on this; it is a frustrating problem.
Chasing ghosts. Ain't it fun? Check everything, even the things that you would not expect. I just now, finally found the battery drain on a 1964 falcon that I have in the shop. It turned out to be a bad stop light switch. It was ever-so-slightly lighting up the brake lights, all of the time. The glow was barely visible in pitch darkness. I have always figure that switches either work, don't. Now I have found a third-state.
Got the light to go out...by converting it back to a 1 wire system. Will a 3 wire drain unless you have both wires hooked up?
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