Gormy86 Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 Hi all, I am putting this in the main maintenance section and not the hybrid section as this may or may not be a hybrid specific issue - I don't know. I have a 2013 Fusion hybrid with 105,000 miles. Starting in summer it had a random dead battery. No big deal, only happened every month or two. I charged it for a few hours and it worked fine again. I figured I'd let it go and see if it got worse. Well, living in Wisconsin where it's negative temps right now has sped up how often it goes dead. I figured it was a battery issue (being original at 4 years/105k miles) so I bought a new one and put it in last Thursday morning. The car drove Friday and Saturday, no problems starting. My wife went to drive it today - stone dead. No lights, no power anything. As always it is completely unresponsive. I jumped it today and brought it to a family member's house with a heated garage (as mine is about 10 degrees right now). Disconnected the positive cable and put a multimeter in series with one lead to the post and one lead to the cable to test draw. The dome lights are always off, even when doors are open (my wife hates how bright they are), so that's easy to eliminate as an issue. I made sure no phone chargers were plugged into the USB charger, all doors shut, lights off, trunk light disconnected (since that was open to test the battery). Every single draw we could turn off and eliminate was checked. After shutting the door and waiting for each system to power down (lights, radio, etc turn off at different times), the meter would drop as far as 0.2 milliamps (often it would step down from 17, to 14, 9 to 7, to 5 as each system shut down). Sometimes it would stop at 5.4, others it would go down to 0.2 milliamps. Either way, this is not enough to kill the battery. It would stay that way for an extended period of time, so I thought all was good. We'd touch the keyless entry pad, open and close doors, turn the radio on and off, and each time the draw would increase, but after each one of these shut back down, the draw would go all the way back down to 5 milliamps or less. Here's the weird part - every so often, with nothing being touched, no lights being turned on or doors opening, the multimeter would suddenly spike to 1.5-2.5 amps. It would hold for a few seconds sometimes, others for a minute or two. Other times it wouldn't do this at all, which probably explains why it isn't dead every time it sits over night. Sometimes this spike happened when a click came from somewhere in the car, other times it was completely silent. I have never seen an issue like this. With absolutely no human input, the draw would just increase like it was going through cycles, after the car hadn't been running for 2+ hours. Has anyone seen this? I watched a video a guy filmed inside his 2017 Fusion where the light on the gear selector knob turned on and off and the radio kept trying to eject a CD every 13 seconds. This isn't doing those same things, but it's about as weird as that where it is randomly powering systems up and down. I don't know what systems are suddenly causing a draw, but I wanted to see if anyone has any feedback before I take this to the dealer to start billing me hourly to track down electrical issues. I worked at dealers for over 10 years, so I know how these things go, and how fast the bill racks up. Thanks all! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gormy86 Posted January 1, 2018 Author Share Posted January 1, 2018 I should add that I tried pulling nearly every fuse under the hood (both on the top and underside of the fuse box) to no avail. I wanted to do the same with the ones in the car, but I was completely unable to reach the fuse box in the dash through the small opening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drolds1 Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 Topic closed by moderator. You've gotten a reply in the other forum you posted in. Any further posts should be made there. BTW, this was the correct forum to post in for this issue. General Powertrain is intended for discussion re engines, transmissions, etc., but it will be left there for expediency's sake. One post per topic, please, so that we can avoid multiple threads for the same topic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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