I’ve got a short circuit on my winter beater (Toyota Celica). It drains the battery so fast that the alternator can’t keep up with it. I can jumpstart the car, but it soon dies again (as if the alternator is bad). The battery also drains when the car is turned off. This problem sometimes goes away though; the other day I jumped my car and drove it, and the battery charged up and held the charge overnight, but the next morning it died when I tried driving it to work.
Today I checked to see if there was a short circuit, so I disconnected the negative battery terminal wire and used a voltmeter to check if the chassis has a positive charge, and sure enough it does.
I tried to figure out where the short circuit is located by pulling each fuse on the car one by one, and checking the voltmeter (hooked up to the negative terminal and car ground). After pulling each fuse, nothing dropped the positive charge from the chassis, which makes sense, because with a short this bad it probably would have blown the fuse if the current was actually flowing through it.
So I assume that the short is somewhere close to the battery. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can locate it? Are there any components that don’t go through a fuse (such as the starter)? I think everything has a fuse because even the alternator has one. This is getting frustrating… at least it isn’t an old British car…