Quote:
Originally Posted by spazfishy
Now, to find that drain. Hmm.. How do we do that?
|
First you need a GOOD meter. I'm sure there are some inexpensive decent ones out there but I personally only trust my fluke meter when it comes to serious diagnosis and I need to see down to an accurate reading of only a few milliamps.
Then you need a good battery because a drain is obviously not going to show up with a dead battery.
Then you need to know how to hook up a meter for parasitic drain test.
The meter will be on the DC Amp (or DC milli Amps) setting with the leads inserted in the appropriate holes on the meter.
The other end of the leads go INLINE with the battery cables.
Meaning the battery will be connected to the scooter as normal then you disconnect ONE of the battery cables from the battery and one of the meter leads will be connected to the battery post and the other lead to the disconnected battery cable!
Ensure that everything is turned off on the scooter,take the key out.
Before you make the final connection of the second lead to the battery cable please do this: Touch and hold the battery cable to the battery post like you are reconnecting the battery to the scooter-
While touching the cable to the batt.post,connect the meter lead to the battery cable and now remove the batt.cable away from the batt.post!
This may save the fuse in the meter from the initial surge of amps upon connection that may occur if there are any modules or capacitors on the scooter that could cause a rush of Amps through the meter!
So now you have the meter hooked up inline with the circuit and you can read milliamps of drain if there is any.
How many milliamps are acceptable drain on a scooter? Beats me but if I had to guess based on the size of the battery than I would say no more than maby 2-3 milliamps. ( on a car with a 55-60 A/h battery max 25-35 mA drain is acceptable but tipically on a good car you will see 7-13 mA drain depending on how many modules and memory demanding crap it is equipped with like onstar,remote keyless entry etc.)
When you estabilished that it has an excessive drain lets say 1200 mA (1.2 Amps) then you start pulling fuses one by one or disconnecting components to narrow down the circuit with the drain on it.
This requires some mechanic with experience doing this so get help if you need to!
Don't fry the meter by accidentally turning on a load that exceeds the meter's capacity (or it's fuse's rating)
Oh and a battery voltage reading will only show you state of charge of the battery and has nothing to do with wether the battery is any good or not!
(you could put ten tiny watch batteries in series and you will read 15 volts but will it crank a starter motor? Heck no!)
You need to load the battery to see if it can hold decent voltage during a nice load like say all the lights turned on or cranking the scooter.
For example you could set up the meter to read voltage (don't leave the leads in the AMPs hole in the meter),hook it up to the battery to read voltage ,then attempt to crank the scooter while reading voltage.
If the volts drop to near zero then you got a bad battery,if the voltage does not change then you got a starting circuit problem. Just some examples.