beerismygas wrote:
i want to see if a short is causing a drain on my car battery.

i have a digital multimeter. one way i theorized was to connect it in
series with the battery via the earth lead and negative terminal.


is this logic sound? or will i fry my multimeter? is there any other
way to find a short (apart from scraping the earth lead to the neg
terminal to see if it arcs - which on my car it doesnt)

thx

Determining if you have and finding are two different tasks.
One simple thing you can do is put a light bulb in the path.
If it glows, you've got leakage. If it doesn't glow, put the multimeter
on the 10-amp scale across the light bulb and see what you measure.

Modern cars have all sorts of electronics that runs in the background.
It's not at all clear what kind of transient current happens when you
power it up. The lightbulb procedure protects your meter against
these unforseen transients.

To find the "short" the easiest thing is to borrow a DC current probe
and trace the wire that has the current.
mike

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