my old 96 SE keeps dying.
 

okay, so since i got the new car my old car has been at home not really doing much. i had to get my CVA and DVA out of it before we sold it. so last week someone came to my house to take it out (im away at school) and my mom said the battery died while he was doing it and they couldnt jump it. so when i went home this past weekend i jumped the car like i normally would and it worked fine. i took it for about a 20 min drive and parked it in the col de sac. the next day i was leaving to come back to school and my mom wanted me to move it to the driveway. so after sitting in the col de sac for a day i got in it and started it with no problem (this was on sunday). now my mom said she tried to start it on tuesday and the battery has died again. what could be draining the battery (that takes 48 hours to kill it and not kill it in 24) the battery is only a about a year and a half old.

Could be something as stupid as an internal component of the battery broke. My 93 GMC TurboDiesel had 2 1000 CCA batteries that were about 4 months old, when all of a sudden on a nice spring day, the truck wouldn't start. I took the truck back to where I got the batteries, they did a 15 second test and dropped a new one into the truck. I believe all they did was to disconnect each battery, put a volt meter to it and saw that one of the batteries was at ~9 volts. The guy told me that they see it occasionally, one of the posts breaks internally, but is still making some contact. Over time it just weakens the battery.

Try getting a voltmeter on it. Next thing you might do is remove all your fuses for a couple of days (if you're not driving it, of course) If the battery is fine, start putting fuses back in, like 4 or 5 per day until you notice the drained battery.

Just some ideas.

Albert

Re: my old 96 SE keeps dying.
 

The same thing kept happening to my 95 when I had my I30 and now my new max. I hardly ever drove it so the battery (optima yellow top) kept loosing it's charge. One thing that drains the battery is alarm LED light and the clock and radio is constiantly getting a charge too.

I decided to just buy a brand new battery and then left the possitive wire unplugged so that the charge would stay full. When I wanted to drive the car I just put the power cable back on the battery.

I was doing some spirited driving, so I can have a couple of idiot friends in the back bang their heads against eachother, and a couple days after that, my car would not start, I replaced the starter a few months ago, cant be. So I checked my red top Optima and the negative terminal was loose, and that was my problem, I had been running off the battery like this for a day after my "spirited" driving couple of days ago. I brought the battery to autozone, they charged it up for free, took over an hour, went to lunch then, came back, asked him to do a free voltmeter to make sure the alternator was not draining the battery, which it was not, and everything all set now.