angelonc

Driving (or, trying to...) a 5sp manual 2001 Honda Civic. It has had some electrical issues in the recent past, currently has a nearly new battery (~3 months old), and a new alternator less than 1 year old. Lately, the battery repeatedly drains overnight or over just a few days. It will start and run fine with a jump, and I just took it on a 3 hours drive and it handled it with no problem, so this pretty definitively rules out the alternator (which is new anyway).

My first suspicious was a parasitic draw, but when I try to measure it, nothing! Here's what I did: unhooked negative battery terminal, and used a multimeter to measure current from the negative cable to the negative terminal. As far as I can tell, there is NO current being drawn when the car is off (should I be suspicious that it is 0A?). When I first connect the multimeter, it will show ~100mA which quickly goes down to 0mA after a few seconds (even in uA range, it is 0.00...). To make sure the multimeter worked, I turned on a few car lights, the radio, etc. when the meter was connected and the current indeed goes up.

My first thought was a bad battery, but I took it to Walmart to get tested, and it tested fine... Remeasured it after it was charged and tested, and still 0 amps. This made me think that maybe the ground connection is bad, so I tried testing the connection with the meter, but it seems fine (relatively low resistance, meter beeps when touching to ground cable terminal and chasis mount points).

I'm kind of at a loss here... not the alternator, not the battery (assuming a Walmart test is definitive), but no draw of any kind when the car is off. Any thoughts?