Chrysler Repair: 99 Sebring battery drain problem, advanced auto parts, fusible links

Question
Hi Roland,

Geez, this is getting frustrating!  Are you tired of me yet?  I thought for sure we had something with those two fusible links making the numbers skyrocket like that.  Here is what I did after I read your response:

My meter has two different holes for the red lead, a “V{ohms}mA” jack and a “10A” jack.  Before I was using the “V{ohms}mA” jack, but I was getting nothing with that one this time so I switched it to the “10A” jack.  I have the meter in between the pos. clamp and the pos. battery terminal.  With the selector on “A - - 10A” (there’s actually a solid AND a dotted line between the first A and the 10), the display says  “–0.12”.  I tried what you said, leaving it hooked up the other way and watching, but it didn’t seem to want to change.  I’ll do it some more though, just in case.  The doors are tight, and I don’t have the glove box or trunk light even hooked up right now.  Advanced Auto Parts says my battery is good, too.  

You know, this began as an intermittent problem; I only started disconnecting the neg. cable every night when I had a dead battery three mornings in a row.  I assumed it had escalated or progressed to a constant problem.  If that’s not the case, and I just had three unlucky mornings in a row, how to we tackle an intermittent problem?  I am going to leave the battery attached tonight, just to see if it is dead again in the morning.  Luckily, we have an old Voyager I park right in front of, and my daughter’s Intrepid (yes, we’re Chrysler nuts, too!) has been running fine (knock on wood) so I am never at a loss for a jump. J

What’s next?  Thanks again!

Kathi


Answer
Ok, now you have found an excessive draw, but you did it in an unconventional manner. That much draw would certainly weaken the battery overnight. The '95 manual shows there to be 4 relays on the firewall, left to right fuel pump (which would cause a humming sound from the fuel tank if that were the one), the autoshutdown relay (which powers the spark coil, injectors, and oxygen sensors), the electronic transminssion controller, and the back up lamps relay. You may not have that last relay, it could have been moved by '99. You should be able to feel which relay is clicking. If you don't hear the fuel pump then I bet it is the middle one, the ASD relay. It should not be activated by the simple reconnection of the 30A fuse. Only turning the ignition to "run" should do that, and then only for about 1 second (check that out). However it will re-energize as soon as you use the starter motor and will remain energized if the engine is running. It should shut off when you shut down the engine. So either that relay is flakey, or the wire from the relay's pin 4 to the engine controller pin 67 which is red/white has an intermittent short to ground, or the engine controller from some reason is falsely grounding the wire when it isn't supposed to. I would pull the relay and find the two pins that have 12v on them (should be the forward and the right side pins). The rear pin should have no volts on it, and the left pin (4) should either have no volts and should be "floating" (or it might have 12V on it, so measure that pin's voltage and let me know) as regards its voltage and resistance to ground if there is no voltage on it(some high ohm reading). If you find it to be 0 ohms to ground then either the red/white wire is shorted to ground or the engine controller pin 67 is grounded when it shouldn't be, for reasons to be determined.
Roland

Hi Kathy,
No, this is progress. I am not sure why the mA jack position (and I presume you put the selector switch on a "mA" position) didn't produce a reading unless on that set up the maximum reading that will show is 100ma=0.1M. But in any case, the 0.12A (120mA) reading is about 4 times higher than I calculated via the resistance reading, but that could be due to a solid state component not being activated when the car battery was out of the circuit and the meter's internal battery voltage was too low to kick it into action. But the bottom line is that the 120mA (0.12A) while not trivial should in no way discharge a battery overnight. That current is about the amount of energy that a 1.5 watt light bulb would draw! So as she sits I don't believe it will be discharged tomorrow morning, unless of course the battery was already discharged from all the sitting/testing/unknowns going on since you last drove the car. If we keep in mind that the storage capacity of the battery should be at least 50 ampere-hours the car would have to sit for 400 hours before it totally discharged.
Now that you have the meter set up to measure the current, it would also be a good time to do the fuse/fusible link pulling exercise, one at a time, to see if you can devine which of those are drawing how many mA each by seeing how much the current drops below the 0.12 reading. Maybe you will find a fuse/fusible link that is pulling most of the mA and we can decide if that is reasonable based upon what components it serves.
Roland