Keep Loosing Battery Charge

[ae86 boy]

for the past year ive been having electrical problems. I have now replaced the alternator and battery with brand new items on my r32 gtst. alternator charges the battery great, when the batterys charged it has plenty of kick. But if the car sits for a day or more the charge has dropped considerably. after 3 days or more the battery will be dead flat!

cannot find any loose or worn out wires where charge may be escaping - what is going on!

ps. my brand new battery is now 100% (wont charge at all from a battery charger) - im assuming this is from it being left dead flat a couple of times...

[GTR-N1]

Aftermarket alarm/immobiliser is often the culprit that drains...

Got one?

[WMDC35]

boot light switch broken so stays on?

[ae86 boy]

Aftermarket alarm/immobiliser is often the culprit that drains...

Got one?

yer it does and its pretty much farked, goes off and on at the most random times - ive unhooked the alarm speaker though so it only flashes the lights.

so to take it out do i pretty much just find it (under the dash somewhere im assuming) and rip it all out?

[GTR-N1]

If your system is a big-name one & was installed professionally, the wiring is probably black; and so those wires might be hard to separate from the rest of the looms. How confident are you to locate such wires?

If your car is a thief magnet and you desire to have a good alarm/immobiliser installed, it may not cost much more to have the old system replaced with a new one, than to have someone simply remove the old one.

[SMOKEYV35]

sounds like a parasitic drain - I had the exact same prob - and as Terry said, alarm was the culprit. It was a good brand alarm - top of the line VIPER - but had been installed by a hack. He'd wired up a relay backwards so that when the alarm was armed it was causing a drain on the battery.

it's easy for an auto elec to diagnose the drain - they just put a multimeter across the battery with the car switched off and watch for a gradual drop in voltage. can do it yourself if you've got a multi.

from there it's a matter of chasing the drain - but with your alarm symptoms i'd say you've already identified it.