e30 battery drain/flat

[gouba 0]

Hi all

I had a pretty interesting situation occur and i can't work out whats happened.

I recently had to change the master cylinder on my car, so i took the opportunity to do a pile of maintenance. This included oil change, fluids and my valve cover gasket as it was leaking oil everywhere. After changing the valve cover gasket i water blasted the engine bay to get rid of the oily gunk on the engine

Since then my battery has been going flat? this morning i went down stairs and my alarm was making an awkward whizzing sound (i'd heard it during the night but assumed it was the wind and not my car) and it failed to start.

I jump started the car and everything was fine, took it for a 15 minute drive but came back to a dead car again and the alarm was going again (it goes as soon as the battery is disconnected).

Could I have done some damage to the electrics whilst i water blasted it? Or is it unrelated? What should i look at?

Failing all this, who knows a good auto electrician in Auckland ?

[my_e36 43]

Probably try check some of the more obvious things first, interior, park lights, etc...

Charge and check battery condition. then check battery drain, bridge a suitable multimeter and check by removing fuses one by one try to narrow down to which circuit is causing trouble. Go from there.

[raewyn22 149]

This could be completely unrelated, however a similar thing happened to my E30. It would run fine, but after turned off for several hours, had to be jumped started. Would go for a long run to charge the battery, but would still go flat. For my car, it turned out to be a really crappy battery.

I replaced the battery and no problems since.

I thought it was odd too, as it just started happening out of the blue - no warning signs or anything..

Hope this helps...