High current draw with car off - Was: What's the best replacement fuel line?

[Kevin Hoff]

A follow up from a while back and new question:

I ended up getting 5/16" steel brake line from the same store as before.
This stuff is made for big trucks with air brakes.  It's almost exactly the
same size as the metric fuel lines that came on the car and is coated with a
similar epoxy as well.  Pretty nice stuff, although it would have been nice
to find Aluminum.

So now this old car is throwing every trick in the book at me...  It was
killing the battery overnight even with a fresh new one.  I connected the
DMM to it and discovered a continuous draw of 4A even with EVERYTHING turned
off.  Crazy.  So after tons of debugging, sealing cracked/shorted wires in
the trunk, cleaning every connector in the engine bay, pulling every fuse
and relay, and pulling the radio, I still ended up with a draw of about 300
mA - enough to kill the battery in about a week...  It turns out that almost
all of that draw is from the trip computer - unplugging the trip computer
from the back of the instrument panel reduces the draw to 5 mA and
unplugging the clock power reduces the draw to virtually zero.

So my question:  Is ~300 mA the REAL draw that I should expect from the trip
computer?  It seems excessive, as the battery could be pulled quite low if
the car was parked for a few weeks.  My other car (a Subaru Impreza) pulls
about 25 with the alarm on, less with it off.  Does anyone have a 4kq with a
working trip computer and no known electrical problems that could measure
the load?  You would need to ensure that the stereo is unplugged, including
any add-on amps, and take the key out with the doors closed.  Then pull the
battery ground and put a decent digital multimeter between the ground wire
and the - post on the battery.

Thanks for reading my novel,
--Kevin Hoff
Durham, NC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kneale Brownson [mailto:kneale at coslink.net] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 7:47 AM
> To: Kevin Hoff; 'Quattro List'
> Subject: RE: What's the best replacement fuel line?
> 
> Fuel line usually is steel.  If it's the right inside 
> diameter, the kind of stuff he used for the brakes should 
> work for the fuel.
> 
> As an alternative, you can use a flexible hose product 
> designed for supplying high-pressure fuel.  Sometimes called 
> fuel injector hose.  Any good FLAPS should handle it.  Be 
> certain to get the special hose clamps designed for high 
> pressue fuel line application.  Only real problem with this 
> stuff is it's much larger outside diameter than steel lines 
> and won't fit inside the clips Audi uses to hold the fuel ines.
> 
> 
> 
> At 11:53 PM 10/30/2006 -0500, Kevin Hoff wrote:
> >That's very true but before I walk the gauntlet (the guy is pretty
> >crotchety!) I'd like to figure out what material to request.