Have a new champion battery 5 months old, has been great. Now the battery is dead after 4 days, charge it over night and it's fine. Radio no longer works, headlights and everything is fine, but after 4 days battery is dead again. Radio fuse is good, so know it's not the fuse for that. Any ideas what is causing battery to drain? While it is running, headlights are bright as is everything else (turn signals, dome light etc.) Could it be alternator? This is a 2001 Ram 1500 V6.

 

Check the voltage as the truck is running to see if its charging properly , should be 14 volts at battery at idle or close to that ,,check for a drain on the system , there are some test on this site to try ,, https://axleaddict.com/auto-repair/car-batterydrain ,,

 

Had a friend with multimeter, he said battery at 14.2 and was good. He disconnected battery and said alternator is good. But somewhere it is pulling a .23 reading. He pulled fuses one by one and it still read .23

 

Small drain could be anything , are any lights sticking on ? Brake lights or glove box light ? Install anything new lately for upgrade ? anything wired in with direct battery voltage ? I had aftermarket gauge once that when wired with direct battery voltage it would drain battery, had to swap to key ignition voltage only

 

Do you have an aftermarket radio with direct connection to the battery?
Did you install any new electrical components recently?
Other item to check is the battery. Charge it up to 12.6v or higher, then do a voltage drop test during engine start. If it goes below 10v during start then the battery is likely the problem.

 

0.23 amps parasitic draw will kill your battery. Did he wait some time after you shut it down to settle out? Sometimes the computer will run things for a bit after key shutoff. When I had a problem with our 2011 Grand Caravan, it took almost 18 minutes until the system really shut off. This video is pretty good for modern parasitic drain testing.

 

Actually no, he did it within 5 minutes of shutting engine off. The way he did it was (I know this is kinda long) disconnected the positive cable from battery, touched red lead wire from multimeter to cable and black lead wire from multimeter to negative cable/post (it was still connected) and went fuse by fuse. The only time it dropped below .23 was when he pulled the main fuse and it went to 0.00 instantly.

 

I just noticed you're in the wrong forum section. You have a 2001, that is a second gen. I'd post your question there, since things changed pretty significantly in the 3rd gen trucks.

 

moving this to second gen.