03/06/2026 10:54 am
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Automotive Q&A
What belongs in a parasitic-draw worksheet besides the final milliamp value?
Review the evidence, add a focused answer, and distinguish confirmed measurements from assumptions.
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We are standardizing battery-drain diagnosis. Current reports often say “draw is 35 mA” without recording how long the vehicle slept, whether keys were nearby, which latches were simulated or whether a module woke during the test. That makes a good result hard to repeat.
What minimum timeline and state information do you log so another technician can reproduce the same sleep-cycle test?
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04/06/2026 8:25 am
Record battery state and test voltage, connection method, key location, hood and door latch states, shutdown time, current at defined intervals, the lowest stable value and every wake event with duration. Note any network, fuse-voltage or thermal-camera observation made during a wake. Also identify equipment kept alive by the test connection itself.
A useful report is a timeline rather than one number: “key removed 14:02; network quiet 14:31; 27 mA stable; 310 mA wake at 14:47 for 52 seconds.” That lets the next technician compare conditions instead of debating an isolated reading.
Topic starter
05/06/2026 9:26 am
The revised sheet uses five-minute checkpoints plus a wake-event table. On the first repeat case, a second technician saw the same 15-minute telematics wake and traced it without reopening the original setup. The handoff was much clearer than our old final-value note.