Hey all.

First post and new 2003 suburban owner. The guy I bought it from failed to tell me the battery drains in 4 days if not ran. I use it for pulling the boat so it doesn't get used all the time.

I am pulling roughly 110mA of drain. I would be OK with 30 or less but 110 is way high. After pulling and testing fuses and relays I found the culprit on the 25A FLASH fuse. If I pull that fuse the standby drain drops to roughly 29mA. Great.

So far so good. He retrofitted his lamps to led and put an issyauto led compatible flasher module in. If I pull the module with the fuse in the drain drops to 29mA same as pulling the fuse. Now I'm thinking it's the led compatible flasher module so I pull it out and found the pinout for it and hooked it up to my bench power supply. It draws 9mA with no other wires connected. That means the bulk of the parasitic drain is connected to the module.

I pulled all the lamps and checked and that didn't solve anything. I figured it wouldn't but it was worth a try. I may just buy another higher quality flasher module and give that a try but I suspect that isn't going to solve anything.

The thing that makes me confused is there shouldn't be power leaving the module unless it receives an input? So maybe with all the pins connected there is an issue with the module?
Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Aftermarket stuff is notorious for issues. I would put the stock flasher and regular tail / brake bulbs back in for reliability. No advantage to LED in those positions anyway. My '11 Tahoe still has its factory bulbs at 140k miles.
Messing around with aftermarket stuff sometimes creates more issues than it's worth. Especially with the China stuff.
Only advantage to LED retro fit taillights is in a high vibration application is like in trailer lights.

 

Marty: Welcome to the forum.
Since LED bulbs turn on faster than incandescent, they give the person following you at 60 MPH another 10 ft of reaction time. Those are rough calculation figures that I did a number of years ago. 😉

 

Thanks for the welcome and the response. I'll give it some more troubleshooting but my investment of time is just about up. I probably will just put the factory module and Edison bulbs back in if I don't figure it out soon. Nothing worse than trying to troubleshoot after somebody else screwed with something.