diagnosing a mystery current drain

[Lawrence Weeks]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:27 AM,  <davidpertuz at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Can some of you who are more electrical people than I am (I'm an engineer, but while I am a lot better at electrical diagnosis than I used to be, I'm much more of a mechanically-minded person) lay out for me the most time-effective method for finding what'd draining my battery?
>
> Can I do something like hook up my multimeter probes across the fuse terminals for each fused circuit and look for current there? Any better ideas? Thinking of all the things that could draw current can be overwhelming and suck up a lot of time. Rapidly eliminating things that can't cause it or aren't would be much faster.

Does your meter have an ammeter built in? If so, you can use it to
measure current draw.

One quick question though: do your hazard lights work? Is the switch
ok? I've found in my cars that leaving that switch disconnected (or is
it the rear defogger switch?) causes the battery to drain. When I have
the dash apart I have to plug those switches in to the harness, or
disconnect the battery.

Larry
-- 
Lawrence Weeks                                    lweeks at anabasis.net
Anabasis Consulting Ltd