• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

Radio battery drain

Share this page

M

mgbcca

Freshman Member
Offline
I have a '75 MGB. When I first got it, the radio (Realistic) was wired in such a way that there was no power to the radio, so it "forgot" any memorized stations when turned off. Last time it was in the shop, this was changed so the radio is always on. This improvement has a downside. I was away in England on family business for 10 days (where I saw, among other things, a 4-seater MGB roadster, but that's another story). I got back today and the battery is absolutely flat - won't even take a charge.

Suggestions?

Thanks in advance...
 
Sounds like it's more a battery issue. How long ago did you make the change to the radio? How old is the battery? I would think that after only ten days a good battery would take a charge. The memory in those radios has an extremely low power requirement.
 
My experience has been that modern radios have 2 power feeds -- one is for the memory (always hot) and the other for the radio/tape deck/etc (switchable).

If they conected the switchable lead to be always hot this would certainly drain the battery.

If you do not have the manual/wiring diagram for the radio and are not sure which lead is which a Radio Shack store might be able to tell you (since that is where it came frm and perhaps the color coding is somewhat standard).
 
Typically, the red lead to the radio should be hooked to hot wire (purple wire in the car)...it runs the memory for the presets and the clock. The radio's orange lead is connected to the switched line (varies from year to year, but my 74 is brown/green)and powers the amplifier.

It sounds like a bad battery to me...or check for shorts!

Bruce /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cheers.gif
 
Back
Top