 what's up mopar fam hope everybody's having a blessed day out there today today we're working on frostbite finally looking into the issue i've had with frostbite for the last couple of years i've honestly i've just been lazy and haven't tried to figure out this problem but for the longest time i have had a battery drain issue on frostbite which is my 2011 ram rt i've had to keep it on like a trickle charger especially because i don't drive it that much anymore we just pretty much race the truck and if i do not keep it plugged up to a trickle charger this thing will not start it doesn't matter how many batteries i buy they're always dead after about three or four days so i have to keep it plugged up and i'm tired of that so today we're finally going to tackle this and try to figure out what is draining my battery about the issue now we just got to find the problem and what we're going to do i'm going to show you a couple of tools that you're going to need to do this and it's really not that hard you just got to got to pay attention and set these meters to the right way and have a pair of needle nose pliers and start pulling some fuses more or less and watch the meter and see what's going down so the first time i show you is this meter right here um this is a pretty decent meter similar to a fluke this is a harbor for uh this is a harbor freight meter this o meter cost uh i believe about 50 bucks i bought this one today and it works pretty good now your other options are you can go a little cheaper this is about a six dollar meter does the same thing just not as fancy i'm going to show you how to use both of them um because obviously you know especially if you're going to use it use this tool one time you may not want to spend 40 or 50 bucks or 100 on one the six dollar one will get you by so i'm going to show you how to do the test with both meters but what we're going to do is you need access to your fuse panel or your fuse box which on the ram truck it's all under the hood right here and then your battery and before you do this test you want to make sure that you have all the doors closed anything on the interior is turned i turned off if there's any lights on you gotta make sure everything's turned off the doors are shut and you want to make sure the truck is fully asleep so what i recommend is letting the truck sit for probably 30 minutes or so maybe even hour that way it's all asleep and you don't want nobody to open the doors to where any lights come on or anything to affect the outcome of this test the other thing you're going to need to do is on the hoods usually they there will be a hood light so when you open the hood a light comes on so if you still have a hood light you're going to need to unplug that light that way when you raise a hood that light is not creating a drawl and it throws your testing off so with that said we're going to pretend everything is done and we're ready to do the test so after you have the negative terminal removed off the battery the next step you're going to do is go to your own meter what you're going to do is make sure that you have the red lead plugged into the 10 amp fused area on the oh meter and then your black lead is going to be plugged into the com lead on the meter you're going to go over here and set the meter to the 10 amp section and what we're going to be doing is basically doing an amp test to see if we have a amp drawl or a battery drain on the vehicle so there's our meter it's showing zero right now and then the next step you're going to take your red lead and you are going to hook it to the negative terminal that we took off of the battery so I'm going to clamp it right here now again if you don't have these alligator clips you can simply hold it onto the terminal itself like this I'm just using this for I'm just using this to make my life a little easier right now for this video so red lead clamp to the negative terminal and then you're going to take your black lead and you're going to touch it to the battery on the negative post so when I touch the battery you are going to notice that we have about three amp and then it settles to about 2.5 so we got about a 2.5 amp drawl on my battery so we have something sucking the life out of my battery around a 2.5 amp drawl that's a pretty big drawl most trickle chargers will put out two or three amps to charge a battery so if you can imagine we are taking two and a half amps out of the battery so it's draining pretty quick and that's that's why after two or three days my battery is toast and I have to charge it up to be able to start the truck so how do you figure out that problem how do you find the issue so this is pretty simple you're going to do the same thing we just did we're going to put our lead back on our negative post and then you are going to simply pull out one fuse at a time and watch the meter and if the meter drops at all then there is an issue with that circuit there's something creating a drawl and draining the system so I'm going to skip ahead and save you guys all the headache of every single fuse that we pulled out we have found the fuse of concern and I'm going to show you real quick so again we have it starts out at about three amps and then we go on to about a two and a half amp drawl so we found on this fuse right here which is a 30 amp fuse which is for the radio system if I pull that fuse out I'm going to hook it up he's going to show you the meter real quick so if I there's our drawl I'm going to pull the fuse and instantly we drop down to about 0.6 drawl and that's our issue something with the radio system is creating a big drawl now I don't know what it is however the radio in this truck is the bone stock factory radio we don't have a sound system in this truck anymore we did a long time ago but we still use the factory radio so I don't know if something's failed with the radio and is creating a drawl or if we have a skint wire creating a drawl or perhaps something with the old system is causing an issue creating that two and a half amp drawl so now that we know the area of concern we need to start looking into the inside of the vehicle we need to pull the radio out probably see if we can find an issue see if there's any wiring issues going on skint wires so forth but we at least have a spot to look for and that's kind of how you find this issue again I'm going to show you how to do it with the cheap meter if you want to buy a cheaper meter which is a seven dollar one so we're going to take this one off completely and set it to the side here's your cheap meter so you're going to take this cheap meter you're going to move the red lead to this five amp dc circuit right here you're going to switch the meter to the five amp test so you can see it here right there five amp we're going to turn the meter on now these cords are a little shorter so what we're going to do we are going to hook so we're going to hook the red lead up to the negative terminal lay that to the side we're going to take our black terminal in our hand touch the battery and right now we still have the radio fuse pulled out of the system and you're going to see that we have a 0.73 0.68 0.63 drawl on the battery right now which is about normal i'm going to put the radio fuse back in and then now you're going to see that two and a half or more amp drawl so there it is it spikes around three amps and then it starts to settle around that two and a half amp drawl so there's definitely something going on with our radio circuit and that's it so six dollar meter you can do the same test with works just as good or you can have a you know a more expensive meter it doesn't matter simple test and that's it so now like i said we're going to dive into the truck and see if we can actually find the issue it might just be the radio has a problem with it so obviously we don't need a radio in this truck so if that's the case we may just leave the radio fuse out or unplug the radio from the back of the radio so we'll figure it out but if we can find an issue we're going to definitely let you know so stay tuned