Frank, From your message, It is unclear if you want to look
for the drain with the engine running, or with it off.
I will discuss off:
For a low amperage loss:
WIth the engine offf, pull the negative battery terminal. Place an
ammeter (or an ohmmeter) from the Neg terminal to ground (or
to the cap).
Now you must hunt for the loss. Pull each fuse individually and look at
the
ammeter. If you pull the fuse from the leaking circuit, the ammeter will
drop to zero.
When that fails, you need to be looking at UNFUSED circuits. Refer to
your wiring diagram, and pull (& replace) connectors until you see the
loss disappear.
I had a very slow loss. Over a few days/weeks the battery would be
drained. I checked everything, and eventually narrowed it down to the
voltage regulator (TR4A). The regulator was fine, but there was some
rust dust that was making a really weak short between some of the
electrodes. The loss was only a few milliamps, hard to be sure it was
there with poor connections to the meter, but cleaning the reg got
rid of those few milliamps, and the problem was corrected "permanently".
-Tony
Message text written by INTERNET:triumphs-owner@autox.team.net
>From: Frank Kucharik <fgk@us.ibm.com>
>Subject: Battery drain, archive?
>Can someone repost the instructions on how to tell if
>something is draining the battery? Where do you put
>both leads of the voltmeter so you're not reading the
>12V coming from the battery?
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