Having spent a month hunting down my issue of battery drain I have finally isolated it to what I believe is the issue and I need to bring this to an ends. I have isolated it to connector C3 on the back of the dashboard and I have recorded in detail the behavior of the cluster as well as the battery drain and shall write it down below.

I split this into different posts because... I'm going to be honest I didn't expect this to drag me 8 different ways. Next time I have an issue I'll try to keep it more organized and this is my last post on the issue.

Battery drain behavior: 900ma peak, drops down lower and lower to around 340ma and then spikes back up to 700-900ma till the battery is as drained as our wallets filling our fuel tanks when going on road trips. Unplugging connector C3 on the dashboard brought this down to 3-7ma with connectors C1,C4 plugged in and radio plugged in (Thank god because I love mine. IOD fuse works as stopgap.
Test duration: Tested at lengths of an hour to hour and a half at max. Current followed the same behavior, with IOD fused current remained very steady at 3-4ma
Test method: Multi-meter with a resolution of 0.000 set up as current mode. Cables connected between battery and negative cable.

Cluster behavior when on: Fully functional with no glitches, self test reports no issues.

Cluster behavior when off <40 seconds: Cluster needles are steady and the LCD/VFD screen has glowing grid-lines like I have drawn below. Color is possible orange to blue, I have the standard male partial red-green colorblind-ness so hard to tell exactly.

A hand drawn aproximation of what the LCD/VFD screen looks like when sitting. Number of lines not accurate.


Cluster at 40 seconds: Stepper motors can be heard making their characteristic flutter/twitch sound. LCD/VFD goes dark for a split second then comes back. Recorded here in the dark, I tried to stay quiet but breathing is necessary. Recording here (Audio Only). Ignore the channel name and other videos. I'm young and make stupid stuff.

Cluster behavior after 40 seconds: Cycle has repeated.

Possible causes:
- Cut the parking light HOT while battery connected and reconnected it with battery connected. Possible blew something.
- Replaced interior lights with LED lights and one had bad connection, rotated it made fuse blow. Possible blew something.
- Old age and just stuff happens you know.

Things not tested:
- Can bus giving data pulses. I have 6-12V LED's I will put in the connector and see if data/power is flashed.
- A short in the harness of the cluster itself.

Forgot to add:
What are my options for dealing with this issue? I dont want to do the 800+ a replacement will be unless its completely needed.

 

Update: used cluster from ebay arrived and nothing. It still does this increase and decrease current and twitch dance all the time nonstop. Now i'm not sure what to think as i know its connector C3 but i cant figure out why my cluster keeps waking up for a split second exactly every 40 seconds. My only guess is CANBUS is being naughty and not shutting up but IDK how to troubleshoot this.

Edit: It appears canbus B- is triggering every so often verified by LED as it would glow occasionally.