Rear speakers draining battery

[Drifting in 808]

ahhh so many wires!!! i traced the wire and it was runing from my deck to thru the trunk. I don't think its a bad battery, its just a little over a year old. i can run my front speakers and no drain. once i reconnect the two wires to my rear speakers, leave it overnight, come back in the morning and my battery is dead. i live in WA and it gets cold. But it can't be the cold only draining my battery when my rear speakers are plugged in. i need to find out why its taking power when EVERYTHING is off.

[Sarthos]

your speaker wires are somehow receiving DC current...but how the hell that's happening I have no idea.

You know, this is actually possible with a bad headunit. If there is a short of some sort that goes from the constant power supply to a rear speaker output, that just might be able to do it...extremely unlikely. Try seeing what happens if you just leave one rear speaker in.

[charles.scarlet]

so true

What made you even think to unplug the rear speakers when your battery was draining? I mean I know that when the battery drains on my car the first thing I think of is to unplug the rear speakers. Oh, and when it runs out of gas I remove the passenger's seat... There's some missing information here.

hey this is the best thing to ever do

[kapone]

What made you even think to unplug the rear speakers when your battery was draining? I mean I know that when the battery drains on my car the first thing I think of is to unplug the rear speakers. Oh, and when it runs out of gas I remove the passenger's seat... There's some missing information here.

I'm sorry but this was the funnies thing I read in a while ....

How about unplugging all power to the deck ... and connecting the rear speakers and see what happens. That should give you the source of the drain ...

[Fleetw00d]

Like lucifer1 said, get out your voltmeter, determine which wire is positive, trace it backward, and figure out why it has voltage when the HU is off. Is there voltage out of the HU to that speaker when the HU is off? If so, does the voltage drop when the power to the HU is cut off? Just plugging and unplugging randomly is going to get very frustrating.

[Sarthos]

I'm not entirely sure he'd know how to use a multimeter to check for that. It's not hard though, they're kinda cheap at a place like Radioshack and they have instructions. But there's two possibilities I can think of.

1. his speaker wire is picking up DC current from some other source in the car. Possible someone really messed up when installing an amp and as a result the OP's speaker wires are tied into the remote wire for an amp that used to be there.

2. His Head unit is shorted somewhere resulting in current flow from the constant (yellow?) wire to the speakers.

Oh, there is a super simple solution to this. Add a capacitor to the speakers to act as a high-pass crossover and to prevent DC current from reaching the speakers.