Hello all, I ran into a funny issue today and was looking for some advice. I was working on a 04 E-250 with the 5.4 in it, and the battery was totally drained, so I installed a new battery and within a minute the battery was totally drained, completely dead would not even read on my volt meter. Also I was told before I installed the battery the day before they tried to jump it with two different jump box's and it killed them also almost immediately. I checked every singe fuse in the cab and the distribution block, all fine. I ordered and replaced the starter solenoid, thinking it may be bad and dead shorting it on the chassis, but what I think is very strange is there is no sparks when I hooked up the charged old battery. It could be bad, so I left the new battery on the charger for the night to try it after the solenoid and hopes that is my issue. I was just wondering if there was any other great idea's that I am missing. Also I checked and cleaned my power wires and grounds. All of them. Thanks

 

I really don't believe you can drain a fully charged battery in that short a time without doing some welding, so if you don't get any sparking when connecting the cables to the battery you have to have an open in either the ground side or the hot side .
You can determine this quite easily with just a test lite or multimeter.
Try this fast test.
Turn the headlights on, then connect the cables to the charged battery. The headlights should then come on . If not either one of the cables is open , or there is a heavy duty circuit breaker just before the fuse box at the under hood fuse box location and it just may have tripped and is open. Also there are fusible links that may have opened, but these usually protect some circuits and I have never seen them open all at once. Does anything work when you first connect the battery?
After getting burned, like taken for a ride, we learn to check everything like the battery charger itself and some new batteries are capable of being defective too.
Lets see what you find .

 

previous poster is right, there's no way to drain that much current 800A in that short of a time without something being welded. blown fuse? something not ground?

 

Here is an update. Been a little while. I replaced the solenoid and all was well.

I still couldn't really make much sense of it. Two jump box's completely drained, as well as a brand new battery, then charged, then drained again. Charged it again, replaced the solenoid, worked fine, no problems, still on the lot doing good. So it was just weird. Maybe a series of dead jump box's and a dead battery but I don't know for sure. It works now is all I can say.