Over the past several months since purchasing this car at auction its been nothing but a supreme hassle. First I had to repair THE entire radiator system …Two months ago my car went dead and so of course I went about my happy way replacing the battery since I was told it had mostly dead cells. A few weeks later I began running into this nasty problem of either my car being dead in the morning when I went out to work or an even worse problem of getting out to run errands… no problems… go into the gas station and come out 10 mintues later to find my car battery was DEAD?!?

I mean seriously wtf.. I didn’t leave any lights on or doors not closed properly that would drain my battery. Ive had the alternator tested and its come back fine… I’ve jumped the battery and driven around to make sure it was charges.

And yet today same things BUT now I was idling and put the car into reverse and the car died on me!

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Does anyone have any suggestions? I’m about just ready to just the thing, being a single mom I can’t continue dealing with these massive car issues every other week

 

Need to see if there is a current drain with everything turned off. You'll need a multimeter; if you don't have one an auto parts store may let you borrow one in their parking lot - they may even help you.

To check for current drain with multimeter: Disconnect the negative battery cable. Then connect the multimeter between the battery cable and the neg. battery terminal. Have the multimeter set to one of it's 'Current' or 'Amps' settings. Start at a high range so you don't fry the multimeter if there is a current drain. If you get a reading of up to about 30 milliamps, then you're probably fine. A tiny amount of current going through the system is normal (running clock, radio settings, etc) even with everything turned off. But anything higher could indicate that something is draining juice from the battery. (If you get a 'negative' reading or the needle tries to go the wrong direction on the meter, reverse the polarity of your multimeter hookup.)

If you do get a high reading indicating a current drain, you need to figure out where it's coming from. That can be tough. But one way to do it is to pull fuses, one fuse at a time, then check for the current drain again. When the current drain goes away after pulling a fuse, you've found the circuit that has the bad component or connection. From there, you'd have to figure out if a component is bad or if there is just a bad connection somewhere. A bad ground connection is often the culprit.

Hope this helps a little. If you don't have a multimeter (or tools for that matter), go to an auto parts store. They're usually happy to loan you tools and even help you fix/troubleshoot the problem.