Current draw at rest on a 1992 buick Century

Question for the group:

My father has a 1992 Buick Century that he claims he left the car parked for

3 weeks with a brand new battery and ALL accessories turned off, that drained the battery.

I took a look at it and in park, engine off, underhood and undertrunk lamps unplugged, the car draws about 6 milliamps.

It's my opinion that this is well within acceptable specs, and that he's probably got a bad/intermittent switch in the trunk or underhood lightbulb socket. Unfortunately I don't have a FSM for this car and I can't look up and see what is considered normal.

He also had some trouble with the remote keyless entry module in the trunk, do those have a habit of failing and drawing excessive power intermittently?

I pulled the connectors to the RKE unit and removed both underhood and trunk light bulbs and sent him home and told him to keep an eye on it. I figured if the battery loses charge again it's a bad battery.

Charging voltage when engine is running is about 14.5 volts. Battery voltage at park engine off is 12.2 volts.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt
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6 ma is not much of a draw. A battery should last a long time at this rate.

You probably have something else activating as you suggested. An older Buick I owned almost drove me nuts until I found the automatic seat belt retractor relay activating at night. I pulled the relay and stopped the problem.

My 90 Reatta was doing the same thing. Drawing up to 4 amps at times. Seemed to be the RAF system (retained accessory features) wasn't shutting down reliably.

Get your self a good schematic and start isolating circuits one by one.

Reply to
HLS

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