OP
joshuabardwell
Elite Member
You are not looking for a short, you are looking for an approximately 100 ohm resistance to pull the 120ma. load. This load would not even begin to drop any voltage anywhere on any of the other circuits, you would not notice it at all. But in 2 weeks, it could drain your battery.
I thought you went to bed!
I was thinking about a short because I have heard about parasitic drain being caused by insulation being rubbed off the wire and it contacting a ground point. But I think your point is that if it was a dead short, I would see a lot more than 120 mA.
I also have a confession to make. I just came in from the barn where I did some poking around, and it appears that when I wrote the original post for this thread, I mis-remembered the reading by one decimal point, and from that point on, even when I was looking right at the multimeter, I saw what I "knew" instead of what I was actually seeing. In other words, the actual reading is 0.012 amps, not 0.12 amps. I finally figured that out when I thought, "120 mA? I should really be using the mA setting instead of the 10A setting on the multimeter." That big fat decimal point staring me right in the face knocked the sense into me.
Oh, and the cherry on top? On the more sensitive mA setting, the reading is actually about 1.4 mA. It must have been reading 12 mA on the 10A setting just because it lacks sufficient precision in that range. Soo.... Yeah. Thanks for the education, and I won't call it "wasting your time," because the next time I have to troubleshoot an ACTUAL parasitic load, this will have been helpful. But... Whoops.
That still leaves as a mystery how the battery died in the first place. The only thing that operates when the key is out is the turn signals, and my first thought was that maybe my son somehow got in and out of the barn without me noticing and left the turn signal on. But we're in the barn all the time, and there's no way we wouldn't have noticed, especially at night, when it would have been a beacon in the dark. I really have no idea.