So, now that I have all the goodies wired up in my car, I can't leave it sitting very long without the battery going dead. Case in point, I parked the car Tuesday night when I got home from work, went on vacation, came back Saturday night to a dead battery. Obviously for long term absences, I will start hooking it up to a trickle charger/disconnecting the battery. I was just wondering if anyone else has a problem like this, or has any idea how I could fix it.

 

I am having a similar problem. My battery dies after leaving it sit for more than 2 days, and I have an Optima yellow top battery. I'm still looking into a way to fix it.

 

Yea, I have a Red Top

 

They're turned off, but many of them have a constant 12v wire that always draws some power. Usually its just for retaining memory for settings and datalogs, and doesn't draw much. I'm not sure what's going on though.

 

^^^What he said.

 

I'm going to do some troubleshooting probably this weekend to try to see what's going on. I had posted something about this a couple weeks ago and mentioned that my total draw on the battery with the car off was only something like 25ma. Not a whole lot. So I'm not sure what's causing my battery to die. I thought maybe it wasn't charging fully, or maybe the battery was defective. But I've been disconnecting the battery overnight and it doesn't seem to be dying anymore. So its definitely dying because of a drain. I have a datalogging fluke meter so I'm going to set it to record the draw on the battery overnight to see if it fluctuates over time.

 

The relays in this car are Postive ground specific...what that means is if you have the polarity of a device reversed (installed incorrectly) it will prevent the relay from turning the system off and that system will remain on draining the battery quickly. This seems to be a symptom of the more advanced car electronic systems we are seeing today although I've only seen it in the RX-8 the circuitry is the same in other vehicles.

it is hard to explain without a diagram but a better DIY explanation is take a cell phone charger, reverse the polarity, plug in your phone, and plug it into the accesory outlet in the center console. Now turn on the car on and off, you'll notice everything in the interior (radio/Nav/etc.) will remain on...even after you remove the key! you can even leave the car and lock it while it still runs!

This can occur in other systems in the car that aren't as obvious as the radio still functioning.

 

I have two subs with and amp, a computer, a lcd screen, a reverse camera, foward camera..... still on the stock battery. I haven't had any problems with it going dead on its own. I've left for a week and when I came back she fired right up. I can run the stereo/computer for 60-120 minutes depending on how loud I have it cranked up (volume 10-20 respectively) without the car running. Any longer and she cranks really slow and requires a push start. I've killed the battery this way many times, I know it is very bad for it but whatever. When it takes a crap, I'll have mazda replace it. I also don't have any problems with the lights diming with the music... am I the only one that is happy with the stock battery?
I've hade the car for 15 months.