parasitic draw testing

So are you talking about doing other testing and no longer doing the parasitic draw testing? If you are still talking about parasitic draw testing, and the ammeter is not in the circuit and switched on, nothing is happening in the car then as soon as you come back 30 min, or whatever, later and switch the ammeter on, everything in the car is going to wake up and you've achieved nothing. So, I guess from where I'm standing I don't see to value proposition here.

 

Go back to harbor freight and buy some alligator clips. Clip one end to a multimeter lead and the other to the test point. Be sure that the leads aren't shorting out to each other or a ground (any piece of clean metal on the car.) They sell one pair 36" for $3, 5 pairs 18" for $3.60, and an expandable pair which goes up to 30 feet for $20. The advantage of the most expensive one is that it is long enough to run the test leads completely outside the car through a window, so you can have all the doors closed and not have to worry about what "open door/hatch" is doing to the car's logical state. (Prius's have all sorts of logical states, with different current draws for each.) Just to double state this point, for parasitic draw testing the car must be fully off, all the inside and outside lights off, and the doors and hatch closed.

 

You are doing an advanced test that may tell you it has an excessive parasitic draw but it does not fix it. Fixing it takes much more skill and experience.

It was not. You had the “Blind leading the blind.”

A combo meter could be causing a parasitic draw as could hundreds of other things.

Your friend is one of the blind when it comes to a Prius. There is no alternator but there is a hybrid inverter’s dc to dc converter charging the 12v battery. It is using the 201vdc hybrid battery as the primary source especially when the engine is in Ready but not currently running.

If you measure voltage over 13vdc in Ready mode, the car is charging the 12v battery.

When it comes to testing for excessive parasitic draw you must have the meter in 20A amps dc mode like the marked up pic. The meter leads are ok for measuring amps in an off state but are not fused inside the meter.

Do not measure voltage with the leads like this. It will burn!



You must have the car off and no lights or aftermarket stuff on.

The rear hatch open will turn on the lights so you have to wait for them to go out AFTER the meter is hooked up. Turn off the hatch light using the little switch. Usually takes a few minutes, not 40 minutes.

This is the way I do it. Perform the four steps, wait 5 minutes and write down the reading. With all lights off it should be 0.03 or less in the 20a setting.

 

Multimeters are not built to standard design and there is no way of telling what plugs do what on that meter due to the lack of clarity of the image. I find that image to be needlessly complicated and that is coming from someone who already knows how to make the connections.

In essence, you remove the negative battery terminal clamp from the battery and move it away from the terminal. Connect your red probe to the battery terminal and your black probe to the negative terminal clamp. To make this easier, use some suitable clamps or use what is called jumper cables, which are cables that have a clamp at each end.

The important point that was trying to be made here was that if you are trying to do an excess draw test do not attempt to do it with the car switched on – not READY, not ACC, not IG-ON – AND have all accessories and lights switched off. If you have the car turned on, there is the potential for there to be current flowing in excess of 20 A and so it will blow your meter as in that configuration it does not have a fuse to protect it.

 

No, I was referring to the image that you referred to in post #24 which is not at all clear. Your image was fine.

 

Come on really? You don't have any large bulldog clips or spring clips of any kind? Not even jumper cables just lying around?

Insert the black cable into the black plug, and insert the red cable into the red plug. Switch the dial to point at 20 V on the DC volts scale (the block on the top right). Probe the red (positive) battery terminal with the red probe and probe the black (negative) battery terminal with the black probe. Do this with the car in READY.

You can also do the above with the car OFF. Do this before the car is READY and after the car has been OFF for 2 hours or more. Both voltage readings should be different with each test. Post them here if you want advice. Or even if you don't want advice, post them here because we'd be interested to know anyway.

 

Ultimately yes all energy comes from the engine. Even energy recovered by braking first had to be generated by the engine.

 

Yes.

Back to post 24. The reason you do four steps is to keep power on the vehicle’s computers at all times. This eliminates the wait for those devices to power down which is required if you simply remove the battery cable and add the meter.

If you power cycle the car and read 0.00 amps the whole time the meter or the leads may have been damaged.

 

You keep saying this, but we know that the Gen 2 steps down over a period of 20 to 30 minutes so setting the expectation it will only take a few minutes is unrealistic and could cause a false fail test.

 

Sorry.

 

Given that you are having such difficulty getting a hold of what are very basic concepts, perhaps you need to stop trying to teach yourself from the internet and find someone who knows this stuff to come and stand alongside you and teach you hands-on. It really isn't that hard, you just need to be shown and have some right there at whom you can fire your questions and who can immediately correct any misunderstandings you latch on to right then and there.