woger151 > wrote:
>Last weekend my wife reported that the battery was dead in our 2000
>Honda Accord V6.
>
>I charged battery overnight; started fine after I put it back in.
>Looked for drains with a multimeter; after a few minutes, current went
>down to 12 mA, which AFAICT means there's no way it could empty the
>battery. (Car had been parked at most a couple days, and it's pretty
>warm here.)
>
>After getting some reasonable replies in a different thread here, I
>took it to Advance Auto Parts and had it tested for free. Everything
>checked out fine.
>
>Anyone have any ideas? I know that electrical issues can be
>notoriously hard to diagnose. Is it possible there's something about
>the alternator or the rest of the car's electrical system that the
>test at Advance would have missed? (The test is broken down into a few
>parts (battery, starter, charging system), all reporting normal.)

1. Your wife left the dome light on and didn't tell you.

2. Your teenage daughter has been making out with her boyfriend
in the car in the garage with the radio on full blast to hide the
noise.

3. Something intermittent is coming on, like a faulty latch that sometimes
doesn't close the glovebox completely.

>Also, if there was something seriously wrong with the alternator or
>battery, I assume I'd be getting dead batteries more frequently. We
>had a dead battery quite a while back, probably due to cab light being
>left on. After that, last spring the alternator went bad. Had that
>replaced. A couple weeks after that, left it at the airport for about
>5 days; dead when we got back. Had it jumped. It's been fine until
>last weekend. THat's a pretty big gap (early May to mid August).

A popular failure mode is for the alternator diodes to fail and the battery
to discharge through the alternator when the car is parked. But if this
had been the case, you'd have seen it on the ammeter.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."