Excessive Battery Drain

[Jabbah]

I've recently put a new Optima Yellow top in and it has gone flat enough to struggle to work the windows in 12 days. What can I do to work out what the parasitic drain is? Radio has been out for a week so it's not that. Guessing the alarm and / or immobiliser, but how to check other than charge her up and leave them disconnected?

[Jhonno]

Multimeter..

[mike_e]

Boot light? Rear Interior light? You can measure the current drain with a multimeter, put it in series with the positive feed wire(s) and remove the fuses in turn to find the circuit with the power drain.

[Jabbah]

Got around to checking this today. There is a constant drain of 100mA, which drops to 10mA when I remove the Master Ignition fuse (or take out the silver key). This sounds about right as it's a 55Ah battery so absolute max of 23 days at that drain rate. Why would there be such a high drain all the time though on the master ignition circuit?

[TheRainMaker]

Tracker?

[fatjon]

Alarm module, under helmet holder.

[Jabbah]

Why would the alarm module be affected by the silver key?

[fatjon]

I couldn't say if it is or isn't but mine had the same symptoms and when I unplugged the alarm module the drain went from 100ma to 5ma ish and the problem went away. It does not seem to be a fault on the module, just the way they are, or at least the way some are. I changed over to an aftermarket alarm system with some additional nice features like proximity and door popping which solved my woes.

[Juddder]

mike_e said:

You can measure the current drain with a multimeter, put it in series with the positive feed wire(s) and remove the fuses in turn to find the circuit with the power drain.

Thanks Mike - any recommendations where best to put the multimeter in series to do the testing?