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Evening all!

I left my 2011 6R Automatic Polo sat idle for 3 days, after which it failed to start the engine! I was able to bump it with a battery pack and after a short run it would start fine.. Another couple of days and there was a slight struggle again so I initially thought the battery was screwed. After a trip to Halfords they say the battery is fine but it could do with a quick charge, so I broke out my battery charger and all was good. However within roughly 48hrs I could once again hear there's a slight struggle to start so I'm under the impression I have a parasitic drain somewhere. Being new to fault-finding I'm sure I'm not hunting the issue correctly so came to the experts!

My attempt so far:

• With the drivers door open, the door latch pushed into the lock position and the car "locked", I made sure the alarm was disabled (I've had that thing deafen me while nosing around before), and left the car to "sleep" for an hour.

• Checked the fuse box under the steering wheel for rouge amp draws there... fuse 23 showed 10mA draw for a slight second but then dropped to 0. Nothing else showed anything.

So I went for the "not so good method", and:

• Discounted the negative terminal of the battery

• Waited an hour

• Measured the amp draw between the terminal and the negative cable...

I'd see a spike of around 1amp and within a couple of seconds it'd fall to a steady 120mA and hold there. Every source of information suggests ~50-75mA is acceptable. So I went back to the fuses! Pulled one, waited a few seconds, reinserted. Only one fuse had any effect on the draw at the battery. Fuse 23. With that pulled the draw dropped to 0.

Since I'm looking for somewhere between ~50-75mA, and pulling fuse 23 effectively kills ALL draw on the battery, does that mean the culprit likely ISN'T somewhere on fuse 23's circuit?? Or am I going about this completely wrong?



I appreciate this question has been asked before, and the guy who created this thread viewtopic.php?t=72347 had a VERY similar story, however the fact that I can't seem to measure draw across fuse 23, but pulling it drops the draw at the battery to 0 makes me think it might be something else.

Well, thank you for reading my rant and I really appreciate any information/guidence you can give!

Does your car have a light sensor? It's behind the interior mirror

No light sensors, no rain sensors, there's not that much frill to the car at all.

It's an 2011 SEL (comfort?) Polo and in terms of "extra" features all I'm aware of is reverse parking sensors, cruise control and heated side mirrors. There really aren't many more bells and whistles than that.

Over a year ago I installed a dash-cam (into the fuse box) and reverse cam (tapping the reverse light in the boot), but these were my first thoughts and were immediately disconnected and tested. They don't seem to have any effect on this mystery draw.