battery keeps dieing

[corey240]

my battery keeps dieing. i have a light weight battery and it keeped diein. so we hooked up the stock battery in the trunk and it died even faster. whats goin on? i have a s13 redtop. sombody please help asap.

[fatboy]

you have a drain on the battery. trace all the wires back to the fuse box and make sure all the battery cable is fine.

[dfw240_EE]

You just installed a trunk mount battery? I would check your cables and see if anything is cutting into them.

If you have a multimeter you can probably devise some sort of test to figure out shorts easier.

[guyaverage]

Have your alternator checked. It may not be charging, or it may charge fine but bad diodes are letting current flow back into it when its not charging, draining the battery.

Dont go to Autozone for this. Their rebuilds are crap.

[Nismochick240]

is it ur altenator

[Nanaimo]

I had a similar problem with my car (s13 KA24E). I got a voltmeter and hooked it up to the cigarette lighter. The I saw the alternator only started charging after I reved the engine to 3000 when stopped (vroom, not vrrrrrrrrrrooooom). After that it would charge fine until I turned off the car. It turned out to be that the trigger wire was loose in the alternator connector and would only touch when the engine wiggled from revving.

['90_240sx_Lover]

same problem for me, i figured there was some abnormal drain on the battery. It turns out the alternator was bad. The shaft that the brushes rub on was worn down about 1/4 of an inch (very bad) due to oil/grime gunk getting in there from the previous owner having an oil leak. The alternator is a biatch to get out, i'd recomend seeing if it's charging and also see if there is a drain on the battery when the car is off. If u have a voltmeter thing (measures flow, resistance, ampres etc) and hook it up in line with the battery and see if its sucking power some where. If it is, start pulling fuses to see where its coming from.

If it is the alternator, i hope u don't have to buy a new one and u can get the old one rebuilt. Around my area they are upwards of $100, ouch. I got one from my cousin because he did the rb20 swap and had the old motor sitting there. He's working on a sr20det too. I believe he's going to sell the rb20.