hillpc

Same problem here; '04 Burb, pulling 210 mA all night (and day) long till it kills the battery in a week or less. I've seen one or two postings that reported getting a new or rebuilt cluster did not solve the battery drain issue that could be (temporarily) cured by pulling the cluster fuse, marked IPC/DIC on my truck. This made me wary of replacing the cluster. Are there things downstream of the cluster that get fed from it, and could thus continue to draw parasitic current even if the cluster were good? I had put new improved stepper motors in all 6 gauges about a half a year ago (only $18 for parts!) because the speedo and fuel gauge were off. The battery drain issue started a couple of weeks ago. So, leary of replacing the cluster, I made a cheap circuit that would kill the IPC/DIC fuse when the truck shut off. A relay (probably less than $10; I had some saved), 2 fuse holders from Advance (4 and 7 bucks), and some crimp terminals to hook wires together. I could have soldered almost everything in this job to eliminate all the crimp terminals, but not the 2 male plug-ins into the IPC fuse socket. For those I used cut off fork terminals that were fat enough to be inserted into the fuse receptacles and would not bounce out; see pic. Some cheapos I had were too thin and thus would have been too loose. I could have sacrificed some fuses and soldered wires to the blades to make connections. This can all be stripped out of the truck in a minute. I should probably draw up a circuit diagram for more clarity. See the annotated pic below for some info. There's no ground anywhere in that underhood fuse box to run the relay coil, so I ran one (white wire in the pic below) into the box from a stud on the firewall. After I did it a couple days ago it pulled less than 30 mA at the battery after all is shut down and quiet (a few minutes after shutdown). Now we'll see if something crazy happens because I killed the "on all the time" IPC voltage supply to "on during start and run". Another post somewhere mentioned something about needle positions on shutdown. Once I get my daily driver fixed this weekend I'll let the Burb sit for a week and see what happens. If the battery still dies it'll be because it can't hold a charge. Though I may have damaged it by letting it go stone cold dead 2 or 3 times.