Parasitic Drain Specs

Great find, how did you catch the sliding door not latching, was it visual or scan tool live data. Those years Odyssey’s are also known for bad ac clutch relay stay on causing battery draw and blowing over pressure out of ac compressor relief valve

I think I'll do a separate post on the actual diagnosis and repair but just to sumerize, when shutting the right rear door it would latch and then 3 seconds later it would unlatch and it would be slightly ajar. I compared pids on the scan tool left versus right and I was able to see that the ratchet switch never changed state. I had to repair the ratchet switch issue which is part of the latch.

Keep in mind that acceptable parasitic draw is a spec for the battery. If the manufacturer gives you a spec for acceptable draw it is for the vehicle with the correct battery installed. I saw several BMWs and Benz vehicles with a walmart battery that had way too small of a Reserve Capacity rating. The current draw was acceptable for the vehicle, but the battery couldn't handle it and the

I'm just curious why they don't publish a more realistic spec of what the actual current drain is on the car under normal circumstances.

Because 50ma is realistic enough that with that draw on a decent sized battery, the vehicle can sit 3-4 weeks and still start(weather plays a role into this as well) Again, a 43 ma draw was not your primary problem....

Rudy, you are correct of course, I failed to move a decimal point. See my reply to Dave. Still though on my original point, once the problem was fixed I was measuring around 6-10ma which is a bit lower than 50ma. I suppose the spec is more about the limits of what the system can handle versus a typical real world number.

My guess is the spec they list is the maximum range(even if they dont specify that) Its the only logical conclusion,IMO.

Good topic Bob, I think there may be a few reasons. They may be anticipating the installation of aftermarket equipment or like Richard suggested, inferior batteries. Also they could be accounting for older batteries.

Funny how you had the same car and year with the same drain that I helped a coworker on this week. Are you saying that your 43 ma draw killed the battery over night ? Thanks Jason

The van was sitting a lot because the owner had it up for sale but I believe if it started out with a fully charged battery it could take 2 days to go dead. I was surprised only 43ma would drain it that quick but that's the most I ever measured and it was going dead consistently. It's possible maybe other modules were waking up overnight but I didn't do any overnight drain tests. However…

43ma will not drain a normal sized,healthy car battery in 2 days. Either your reading was wrong or your battery was bad.

Thanks for the reply. I’m not at work but that car should have a group 35 or 24 battery and the reserve capacity on those batteries should be somewhere along the lines of 100 -120. Now if you divide that by 4 then you got 25 to 30 ma of acceptable draw. You were at 43 ma. Which is fine and in spec. Honda is right in my opinion. I just can’t see that drawing the battery overnight. I think your

Dave, you and Rudy are correct, my reading, or rather my interpretation of the reading was in error. I was indeed off by one decimal place. I was preparing to take a photo of my setup while current ramping a test light when I discovered my error. I've used my current probe with a multimeter many times in the past for this but for some reason, this time I forgot to move the decimal. I'm going to

Honda also had a bad issue with these vans and sticking A/C compressor relays causing the compressor to stay on. That drained the battery very fast. I'm sure you guys have seen those before but just thought I'd put that out there. Was working for Honda when we first started encountering this issue.

I would say we should be able to come up with our own "specs" Each customers situation is different. One may drive more or place higher demand on their vehicle. If we question the customer properly and evaluate their situation we should be able to decide how much is too much. Through record keeping we can Know what is normal if we keep good records. This way we could make recommendations on

Hi Bill,how did you come by that formula?

To be honest Rudy I do not remember. I take notes and document anything that is useful. I just pulled it out of my battery reference file when I saw this subject.

Fair enough. Do you know that it, in fact, works?

No. I have never tested it. Seemed to be fairly logical math and I think I cross referenced with some other info at the time like approximate depletion time of batteries. Can't say that I have every thought to test it and that would be the only way I would know.

and GM says multiply by 'aprox 0.6' I would go with your 0.4167

Hi Bob. This is a pet peeve of mine. GM vehicle parasitic draw is calculated a 25% of the reserve minutes listed in SI for the vehicle in the battery usage chart. So, for a 115 reserve minute battery, the allowable maximum drain is 28.75 milliamps. However, the actual draw when measured on a vehicle using this value and I'll use the 2002 up Trailblazer/Envoy platform as an example, is less

Martin, That's exactly what I was getting at but you explained it much better.