Current draw while car is off

[Spetz]

Hi everyone,

What is a normal current draw while a car is off?

My car is drawing 0.15A while off. There is no alarm on it.

With the ECU and alternator unplugged the current draw is the same.

Car is a 2001 Mitsubishi Mirage with an FTO 6A12 engine swap.

 

[Popsy]

According to the manual of one of my car, 0,06A is normal, it came from factory with a 60Ah battery.
This is just the remote door control and ECU I guess.

0,15A seem high...have you checked it doesn’t go down when you latch the doors, after a few minutes ? I know some car (Renault) don’t go into « sleep » mode before ~30 minutes if you don’t latch the doors ...just a suggestion.

My Mitsubishi depleted its battery overnight once, inexplicably. Only happened once, garagist never found anything, and it never came back. My suspicions were with the automatic control of the lights, but I can’t prove it.

 

[George7941]

150 ma is high, you need to find out where the draw is. Normal draw is about 20 ma, 50 ma is the limit. You can measure the voltage drop across the fuses to find out which one is flowing the current or unplug the fuses one by one till the current flow drops.

 

[Spetz]

Thanks guys, I'll start checking which circuit is drawing the current.

Incidentally I am having an alternator error code come up... I have replaced the alternator but the same code is coming up.
Unplugging the alternator though had no effect on the current draw

 

[tnt31]

I d0 not know about your specific vehicle but I do know some vehicles take a few minutes (I have seen as much as up to about 10 min) to get into a steady state low draw. If still drawing high after that I would check on glove box light, trunk light, hood light, interior lights etc staying on. Next would probably try pulling fuse for radio. Those are just the ones I would start with first trying to troubleshoot.