After my car sat for just 5 days without being started, the battery died. It wouldnt hold a charge so I thought it was just the battery and replaced it. It sat for 2 days and the battery died again. I charged it and started the car. Alternator checked out good on both my tester and the dash gauge. Shut it off and held my voltmeter to the battery. Its draining .01volts about every 2-3 seconds and wont stop. All Ive done in the past week is replaced one tail light bulb. I cant find anything staying on when the the ignition is off. How do I go about finding what is causing this?

 

Just posted this in another thread, check the starter motor positive line. It could be loose, I had a 79 Malibu do it and we thought it was the battery, it will save you alot of money and its very easy to check. Another check is to start the engine and undo the battery. It should run a good 15 minutes at the least, if it dies before that, its a bad altinator. It can still say it has a full charge and not really be fully chargedm electronics can be finicky like that.

 

Disconnect your battery cable and put your multimeter probes in series between the battery and connector. Measure DC amps to see what your draw is. According the manual there should only be a 50 milli amp draw. Once you have your multimeter set up start pulling fuses one at a time. When you see your amps go down,You've found the circuit the drain is on. You can then dig deeper in that circuit to figure out what component it is. First try the fuse for the tail lights since that is the last thing you did.