joshuabardwell
Elite Member
A few days ago, I went to use my tractor and the battery was dead. Like, won't even light up the dash dead. It had been a few weeks since I had last used it, but it was still pretty unexpected. The key wasn't in it, so it's not like I left the lights on or anything. So I put a charger on it and walked away. The next day, the charger still doesn't show that the battery is topped up, which was a little surprising. I decided to test for parasitic load. I disconnected the negative lead from the battery post and put my multimeter in-line. It showed 0.12 amps.
That doesn't seem like much, but maybe over time it adds up. It's 2.88 amp-hours per day. That's just over 20 amp-hours per week. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me find the amp-hour rating of my tractor's battery, since nobody seems to care about car batteries' amp-hours, only their cranking amps, but the Internet seems to say that a small car battery might have as little as 40 amp-hours. I know deep-cycle marines get up around 100 amp-hours. And of course a standard car battery is depleted at around 50% charge, so it seems plausible that a .12 amp parasitic load could run my battery down in about 2 weeks.
The next thing I did was to reconnect the negative lead and go to the fuse box and check for parasitic load on each of the circuits. I pulled each fuse out and put the leads of the multimeter across the terminals. Each circuit registered zero. I don't know what to make of that.
The next thing I did was disconnect the negative lead again and put the charger back on the battery. At least that will allow it to get up to full charge in a normal amount of time.
Any further suggestions are welcome... :confused3:
That doesn't seem like much, but maybe over time it adds up. It's 2.88 amp-hours per day. That's just over 20 amp-hours per week. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me find the amp-hour rating of my tractor's battery, since nobody seems to care about car batteries' amp-hours, only their cranking amps, but the Internet seems to say that a small car battery might have as little as 40 amp-hours. I know deep-cycle marines get up around 100 amp-hours. And of course a standard car battery is depleted at around 50% charge, so it seems plausible that a .12 amp parasitic load could run my battery down in about 2 weeks.
The next thing I did was to reconnect the negative lead and go to the fuse box and check for parasitic load on each of the circuits. I pulled each fuse out and put the leads of the multimeter across the terminals. Each circuit registered zero. I don't know what to make of that.
The next thing I did was disconnect the negative lead again and put the charger back on the battery. At least that will allow it to get up to full charge in a normal amount of time.
Any further suggestions are welcome... :confused3: