mjheathcote
Centenary Club
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- 9,046
All this talk of batteries and possible tracker battery drain issues, I thought I would do a little experiment.
My car has been parked up in my garage unused for a few weeks on a maintenance battery charger, without the alarm being set. As the boot lid is not quite closed, the boot light has timed out, in other words, I can open the boot to gain access to the battery with no electrical services being activated.
Therefore I unplugged the charger, and using a digital multimeter I connected one lead to the negative pole of the battery, the other to ground on the body. I then switched off the battery isolator so any electical load would then flow through the multimeter. It's important to connect the multimeter first, so not to disconnect the car from the battery and cause a 'system reboot' when connecting the multimeter...the current draw then might exceed the rating of your multimeter if not fused.
The result was a current flow rising and falling between 0.09 amps and 0.12 amps, or if you like a maximum draw equating to 1.5 watts approximately. I repeated with another multimeter and obtained the same results.
I don't think I have a problem with a tracker with such low current draw, the fluctuation could be due to the clock maybe, it did appear to rise and fall every second.
It would be interesting to know the results of other cars, and then maybe if a higher current draw is present, this could be due to a tracker problem.
Cheers
Mike
My car has been parked up in my garage unused for a few weeks on a maintenance battery charger, without the alarm being set. As the boot lid is not quite closed, the boot light has timed out, in other words, I can open the boot to gain access to the battery with no electrical services being activated.
Therefore I unplugged the charger, and using a digital multimeter I connected one lead to the negative pole of the battery, the other to ground on the body. I then switched off the battery isolator so any electical load would then flow through the multimeter. It's important to connect the multimeter first, so not to disconnect the car from the battery and cause a 'system reboot' when connecting the multimeter...the current draw then might exceed the rating of your multimeter if not fused.
The result was a current flow rising and falling between 0.09 amps and 0.12 amps, or if you like a maximum draw equating to 1.5 watts approximately. I repeated with another multimeter and obtained the same results.
I don't think I have a problem with a tracker with such low current draw, the fluctuation could be due to the clock maybe, it did appear to rise and fall every second.
It would be interesting to know the results of other cars, and then maybe if a higher current draw is present, this could be due to a tracker problem.
Cheers
Mike
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