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2004 Chevy Silverado Battery Drain

21K views 5 replies 6 participants last post by  Evv  
#1 ·
Hello everybody my name is Dylan I’m joining hoping y’all can help me figure this out. I bought this 2004 Silverado back in January from the original owner soon as I bought it it sat for 3-4 days battery would die wound up replacing the battery and alternator back in February and it’s been doing fine since then Went out Monday for work and it was dead after I just drove it Saturday. I came home from work charged the battery and it fired right up. I went out this morning same thing took off work to check it out. Alt/battery tested fine so I started checking for a drain on the battery and this is what I have came up with.

With the negative cable disconnected no fuses pulled it’s got a 1.32 draw
Pull the IPC/DIC 0.88 draw
Pulled the radio, IPC/DIC draw is now 0.16
Pulled those 2 along with the LBEC2 now it’s 0.08

decided to pull the cluster itself out since these trucks are so common for cluster problems this one will cut off everyonce in a while.
without cluster installed draw was 0.88
With the LBEC2 pulled draw was 0.82
With the tbc batt fuse pulled draw was 0.75
With all those fuses and the radio fuse pulled draw is 0.03.

sorry for such a long post but I’ve been reading threads and asking everybody I can think of what they think all day so I figured I would turn to you guys thanks so much.
 
#4 ·
I'm a little rusty and do not have the part changer experience I once did, but here's some general tips. You should always diagnose this type of issue on a modern vehicle with everything connected. This truck either has a Body Control Module or the Cluster is the power mode master. Disrupting power to those will only cause confusion. You need a voltmeter with mV reading and sharp probes. Probing each side of a fuse will help identify where the draw is going (windows, radio, other module). Tee higher the mV drop across a fuse, the more draw going through that fuse. Make sure you latch the doors to put everything to sleep. If you have a bad module, which is possible at this age, that won't go to sleep or has a bad connection that keeps it awake - it can be difficult to find without a scan tool.