Just so I am clear how do you measure a draw on the battery?
There are several ways, some of which have been posted already. A clamp-on _DC_ ammeter works, but they work on the Hall effect and are not cheap, like the clamp-on inductive AC ammeters are. I have a nice Fluke, goes to 400A. Not so good at low values. There are ones that read much lower. I have a 10-20A one, a no-name, but I don't think its jaws will fit around a battery cable. All Hall-effect probes are powered, mine use 9V batteries. I've got a really nice Tektronix one, it's wall-powered, and reads up to 1 MHz or something like that. It's actually a combination DC/AC Hall-effect/inductive thing, carefully constructed so that the transition between the two is seamless. As you can imagine, when new it was NOT cheap! (I got it free, very used. I don't know if it actually works, I haven't tried it yet. They're _very_ easy to break with rough handling, and repair parts are NLA.) Any decent multimeter will do it, but you have to put it inline, and that can be tricky. The reason is that if you interrupt power to the car, many things like the radio antenna, upon power coming back on, will activate for a bit. Thus drawing a lot more current than you are looking for, and likely more than your meter will tolerate. Pffft! On my Flukes, that's like a $10 fuse. Cheaper meters, like the ones from Harbor Freight that are cheaper than a fuse, are _themselves_ the fuse! My Flukes will read up to 10A on the high range. Plenty for any kind of reasonable leak test. So, what works, and works well, is to loosen the battery ground cable and put the ammeter probes on it, one on the center post right in the center, and one held (or clipped) to the clamp itself. Then lift the clamp off the post and over the body of the probe, being very careful not to break contact with either probe. Power to the car will not be interrupted this way, and you'll get a clean reading. Reverse the procedure and tighten the clamp. -- Jim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
