SELLER DUMPED MY 2 000 MERCEDES BENZ I FOUND OUT WHY

On today's episode of WatchJargo, we are back in the shop with an old school project and it's time to revive it. This is my $2,000 Mercedes-Benz E500 that just needed a fuel pump when I bought it. And it turned out, it just needed a fuse. What is going on, guys? I am WatchJargo and today, like I said, we are back in the shop with my E500 Mercedes-Benz. That's right, this is the V8-powered, the E-Class Benz that I got for only $2,000. And even better, it's an E500 Sport. So, it turned out like it was kind of a win when we picked this thing up, but it was not a win overall. I bought this thing for two grand, just needed a fuel pump. The fuel pump must have pulled too much current at some point, but we replaced the fuse and I've driven it many, many, many times since without doing any other work to it. Except, every single time you go to start it, it's dead. So that is a big problem. There is a current draw on the battery and the battery's bad, so when I picked it up, I think it made it like one or two days before you could not move it again without a jump. And then, after that, it was like one day. You know, car batteries can only deep cycle so many times and then they're just worthless. So, this one had already been deep cycled a bunch, I'm sure, when I picked it up. And after a couple days of it sitting around here, well, it's just been over ever since. So, unfortunately, it's been sitting here dead other than a couple of times that we've moved it out. And you know what that means. Today, it is time to start troubleshooting the strange electrical draw that keeps killing the battery on the E500 bins. And I don't think it's just natural, you know, the parasitic draw that the system would have keep the lives on the computers and the clocks and things like that. Well, this is a much bigger draw than that, of course, because it will kill the battery within a matter of days when it's a brand new battery and within hours now that the battery's a little bit weak. So, we have something to figure out here. First things first, we gotta put a battery in it just to start because this battery literally won't hold a charge anymore. So, I can't really troubleshoot from that point. So, let's jump in here and see what we gotta get. There's actually a chance I have a battery for this thing, but we might as well pull everything out of the back. Let's see. So, under this sub-trunk here, we have a superstar, an old one, 49 EXT. And it should probably have, oh, I've got 94REXT over here. And 94R. All right, well, I've got Land Rover batteries in stock. I do not have what we need for this. That means it's time to make an O'Reilly's run and swap out this battery. I doubt it's under warranty because it is three years old at this point, but let's go find out. You already knew what we were getting into because I didn't even have to take this thing apart, really. It was just like this. So, it looks like we just need two 10s to pop off the battery terminals. And then it has a strap. Wow, this uses like a ratchet strap to hold the battery in. That is interesting. So, it does have a release. The release is down here, not up here where you'd expect. It looks like that's a normal ratchet strap release. And then once you have it off, you pull forward and it comes off of there. Okay. And then you have another hold-down bolt right there and then pull off your battery bolts and you should have it out of there. Well, that was way more complicated than I was expecting. I thought this was gonna be it. Ooh, the negative's already loose because I've been taking it off every single time I work on it. Forgot about that. So, that was easy. Nothing to worry about there. We are gonna go ahead and pull the positive. Not even tight. Love it. All right, now a 13 for the hold-down. I know I could just take all this stuff out of here instead of holding it with my back, but what would the fun be in that, guys? What would the fun be in that? So, now we've got our hold-down off of here. I could've used power tools for that. Used power tools for the easy part. Didn't use them for the long part. And now, yeah, ready to go. Okay. Ew, it's an extreme. That might be under warranty. We're gonna load this battery up and take it over to O'Reilly's, but something happened the last time I was there that everybody freaked out about in the comments, and that was putting the cabin air filter in the volt. Everyone says it's upside down, and is it? I don't know. So, the consensus is, when I put this in, since there was no cabin air filter installed before, I didn't have a reference for the direction, right? So, I found the picture of it online, and it showed the arrow pointing up. And then, I read some more threads on the volt forums, and people were like, arrow points down. And then, everyone else said, just figure it out. Turn on the blower and put a piece of paper, hold a piece of paper in there so you can see which direction it sucks, and after you can visually see it, shove the filter in. So, that's what we're gonna do today. We are gonna figure out if the air filter's in the right direction or not. We're gonna settle it once and for all. Give me paper. Thank you. All right, guys, cover's on. Time to get everything out of the glove box again. Don't even know if that light bulb's any good, so I'm not too worried about it flopping around there. Pull this out. All right, guys, so here's our cabin air filter we installed. It's actually gonna be kinda hard to uninstall it, because it fits so well. There we go. Slide this out of there. And now we're gonna turn on the blower. Ooh, blasting. And then, okay, it does look like it pulled it in. You can see. If I take the tension off of it, it just flops down. So, I guess airflow direction down. There you go, debate settled. The filter definitely points down. So, I'm gonna grab the vacuum, since I'm here, and now we're at the house, and vacuum out the glove box, and vacuum out the air filter housing as well with a brush, and then throw the filter back in. All right, we got all the dirt out of there, cleaned the entire compartment up, and now it's time to put the filter back in at the moment you've all been waiting for. Here we go. Okay, everybody happy now? There we go, snapped it. Okay, the Volt is wrapped up again for the second time for the same issue there. We've got it on the charger. It is charging back up for just a moment here, and let's take this battery to O'Reilly's right now and get it swapped out for a new one. All right, guys, we are here at O'Reilly's to swap out this battery. Look, I had to drive the BMW. It's a rule, the keys are together. So, let's get in here and get another one of these. One hand in it. Sweet, man, thank you so much. Showed up to O'Reilly's. My brother showed up the same time with more battery problems. He's got the good old part number one here, and we're picking up the Amp Hound because this is gonna let us troubleshoot this car and drop. All right, let's get this all loaded up. That is a beautiful TRD. All right, we are back with the BMW and the Amp Hound, which was the key. So, this entire video here, we need this so we can try to figure out what this draw is that keeps killing the battery in the E500. And here's our brand new Super Start Extreme. We'll close up the BMW here so it doesn't have a dead battery. I do wanna show you guys how interesting the strap system that retains the battery is. I've never seen, I really don't think I've ever seen another battery like it, but you put this ratchet strap on here, basically, and then you pull it tight like that, and it holds the battery forward. Look at that. I guess pull really hard. There it is. Hard as I could pull on it. And now, we'll hook up the bins to a brand new battery, and it's happy. Okay, first things first, the clock actually reset to noon this time. The clock is always very upset in this car. Brakes are upset. Ah, they stopped, they stopped. They were pushing back against my foot like it was ABS. Washer fluid low. You guys remember how cool this car is? Look, eject for cassette. Eject for the CD changer. Okay, I guess you have to hold it. Oh, you only want it once. Look at that. The CD changer that comes out. Oh, it's so cool. What a great car. This thing needs driven. It's literally been sitting for months since this battery issue started, and I feel a little bit bad for this car. It's a great car. It was super nice to drive home, and then just had the world's deadest battery. Okay, let's shut it off, and then start searching for the current draw. So, while I was at O'Reilly's, I picked up the EverTough Amphound, and the Amphound will let us check these fuse circuits to see if there's current draw without having to remove the fuses or anything like that. So, you can see it has a parasitic draw test, which will locate the circuit that is flowing current when the vehicle is off. So, there is a good point right here. I was planning on letting it sit. It said some vehicles will allow modules to continue drawing current up for 20 minutes, and honestly, some vehicles are like unlimited time, but let's get this door open. Let's leave it wide open, because I think the circuits that we will probably be concerned with are right here in the interior stash. So, I do want to be able to access those, and I hope the car shuts down, and I'm also leaving the trunk open, and I opened the hood, so that we could access every part of the car when it hopefully powers down. Can you guys believe the pull tab's not broken on this car? How wild is that? Okay, here we go. I'm gonna go ahead and open up the box with the Amphound in it, and we have access to every single fuse box on the car now. So, we'll go ahead and unlock this one as well. Oh, I see, I see. You have to unlock that, and unlock that, and then, okay. Then it's not a pain to get out. Okay, there's all the fuses. Let's get after it. I was pretty excited about this, because it's never been used. The factory tape was still on it. Also, everyone keeps asking what my knife is. It's a crate. I always tell them that it's something with a K. I don't remember, but it is a cheap out the front, because when I went shopping for Microtex, which is, of course, the only correct answer, the guys were like, what are you gonna use it for? And I was like, opening Amazon boxes? Duh. Using it in reverse to open everything on the planet? They were like, don't buy a Microtex. As you guys know, Microtex are $1,000. I know it's the correct knife, but this crate was like, it might have been 130 or something like that, which is still a lot compared to the Kershaw Volt 2, Kershaw Volt 2 that I carried for the last 15, 20 years. So the old crate tactical is just really cheap, and honestly, it's a piece of junk, too. You hear the rattle, because the springs aren't adjusted properly, but everyone who's ever owned an out the front was like, they're all gonna do that. Ooh, crispy brand new, I love that. Out the fronts are super cool, and everybody asks about it, but having to double check to make sure it deployed properly or it locked back in properly, what I've found is that gravity helps every time. So if you're opening it, it has to be pointed down, and if you're retracting, it needs to be pointed up so that it can suck it back in with enough force. That's a little bit of extra thinking that you might not wanna have to do in life. And it doesn't happen at first, right? The first 50 times, it's okay, but after a year of use, they're really worn out. So, I mean, it's cool. I don't know if you want one, but it's cool. Anyway, we've got the Amphound set up, and it's set to a standard 7.5 amp fuse. I don't know why it matters, other than the fact that the minis might go down to lower amperages, like 2.5, but now we just put the meter across a, say, 7.5, and we should, did I do something wrong? Okay, it's somewhat hard to show you guys what's going on here, but let's do the test. Here we are. You just turn it on, don't push any buttons at all. Okay, no current draw, no current draw, no current draw. Okay, 0.13 of an amp, I think, on that 25. So we'll have to keep track of that. Ooh, is that? Nope, we're gonna have to figure out what that 25 is. Okay, 0.19 on this 40 amp in slot six. That's quite a bit of current draw. I mean, an amp is serious. This sure is cool. What a time saver, guys. What a giant time saver. Okay, so 25, and this 40. 0.21, six and nine. Let's get the map out. Behold the Mercedes fuse map. Okay, so, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. This is the rear, right? It, ugh, it looks like the rear based on the relays. It looks like it. There are 16, okay. Oh yeah, there's some more up top. Man, shut up. All right, so, rear, consuming unit, and six, ooh. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, so it's 006, right? 006 and 008. 006 and 008 happen to be anti-theft control module. Yeah, I can see why that would be consuming some power. And six, audio gateway. Okay, I can see why the anti-theft would be upset. 0.13, 0.2, why is there a 40 amp audio gateway? What on earth? Eight, 7.5 amp? Are you kidding me? Did I do something? Okay, no, no, no, eight is correct. Eight is a 7.5 amp. And six is the one with a 40 in it. Oh, it does take a 40. Was six the audio gateway? Six was the audio gateway. 006, y'all, help me out here. I've already forgotten. It doesn't help that they're not in order. So, 006, it said audio gateway, right? Audio gateway, 006. 40, so that's the whole amplifier and everything, right? This thing has a huge subwoofer right here. It has like a 10 inch subwoofer in the back deck right here. So, I guess a 40 sort of makes sense. Okay, let's go check the front. The audio gateway really seems like the draw. I mean, why wouldn't the anti-theft be upset? The car is kind of moving around right now and it has to be hooked up, right? So, I think our troubleshooting might be unhooking audio gateway since it's drawing so much power right now. But let's check every other fuse before we commit to this. It's kind of hard to show you guys this one here because I gotta hold the meter and go through all of the fuses at once. I also have to untangle the meter again. I walked eight feet, how is it tangled up? Okay, I'm just gonna talk you through it. When you hear the beep, I think it's zero, right? Ooh, we have 0.2, 0.2. I wonder what that one is, 0.2, 0.2. Is every fuse, am I doing something wrong? Yeah, zero, okay. Is that fuse blown? No, we just can't get the points on these fuses. Huh, what on earth? Not a single one of these is testing. Okay, 0.01, I think that's safe, whatever that is, and it's on a 25 amp. I don't know, guys. These fuses or these meter leads, 0.01, okay. I think it's actually just the fuses. 0.02, double-checking, really hard to get contact. Straight zero, 0.02 again. So the interior's still a little bit alive, 0.07. Everything at a hundredth of an amp must be okay, 0.03, but a lot of hundredths of an amp, you know, they add up. We're well into like 0.2 at this point, just from what I've checked, 0.06, come on, zero. You have to push super hard on these fuses. Well, that's all the interior fuses. Let's go check the front, but audio gateway is pulling real power, right? Two-tenths of an amp, a quarter of an amp. That will kill a battery, I think. You know, my entire plan for troubleshooting this originally was, okay, nothing, to just take the thermal camera and take a look at the fuse boxes, but I sneakily did try that off camera and there was no difference in any of the fuses that I could see on the thermal camera. Okay, and up here, everything's just dead as it should be. These are probably all switched. I can see the interior being somewhat alive. BCM has activities to do. Okay, so long beep is continuity, I guess. I really love this meter, I kind of want one, just so I can see inline current draw. I guess I could keep it, it's a rental. Maxi, ooh, the MaxiFuse doesn't measure. That's it, that's every fuse. The only one in the front was this 0.75, which is number 14, right? Ooh, I can't actually tell. It's 64, big difference, I know. Okay, so Fuse 64 had a little current, but Fuse 64 only had a little bit of current going through it, so I actually don't think that that was the problem there at all. The problem has to be here in the rear of this car. Maybe the engine fuse block isn't in this diagram. You shut this off by pushing both buttons. How confusing is that? Why don't you just hold on? Anyway, there are definitely a lot of little draws coming out of the interior, and I think I'm gonna check them all again right now because everything has kind of changed in the last couple of minutes. I think the car might have finally gone to sleep, so I'm gonna recheck the entire interior fuse box here for those current draws. Obviously, it's still a little bit awake. It must know the door's open because it's indicating that the trunk's open here on the door, right? I mean, the car does have to stay alive and operate like a vehicle, so it won't have zero current draw, that's for sure. But I think the audio gateway is our real issue here. I think it's staying awake and killing the car. So I'm gonna look up what one of those costs, because it's the entire amplifier, I think, and I think our next step here is just unhooking that fuse and waiting like two days. What else can we do? I put a new battery in it, so this battery won't go dead fast enough. So I just rechecked the entire interior, and the only one that wasn't zero, zero, zero, or .01 was fuse 41, which is central gateway, and that one was .07. And of course, that is the main thing that connects all of the buses in the entire car, so I think .07 is a pretty reasonable current draw. Let's check the rear ones one more time and see what we need to troubleshoot, because I really think the audio gateway is the thing that's consuming most of the power here. Well, I just checked them again, and the security gateway is pulling .02, and the audio gateway is a .01. .01 is just fine. I don't know why it's awake at all, but .01 seems reasonable. The easy answer here is just unplug this fuse. That came out pretty easy, too. And see what happens tomorrow. Put the mat back in its slot so that it is not lost. Too easy to lose those things. We're gonna try one more thing here before we actually throw in the towel and just wait, and that is, I Googled this real quick, and everybody says it's the driver's seat. Now, my driver's seat, I think, works completely fine in this thing, but the quick Google search, I looked up E500 parasitic draw, probably the first thing I should have done, but the answers were it's either the driver's seat, the passenger seat, the audio gateway, or the alarm module. And of course, we saw a bunch of current going through the alarm module, not a bunch, .2, and then .1 at the audio gateway, so it could be one of those four, and we're gonna have to let the car go back to sleep, and then we'll do a little bit of fuse pulling here. We'll pull the driver and passenger seat modules and see if maybe that lets the car go to sleep, because we still had like .1 coming from almost every module in the interior, which does add up, like I said. So I didn't think it would add up to be enough, but there's a good chance that it did, so let's let the car go back to sleep here, and then we'll try round two and maybe a little bit of fuse pulling. So, so far, the car has woken up, and it was pulling about 10 amps at that point, and it's kind of shutting everything back down, and of course, we're gonna have to wait for a little bit of time here, but right now, we are at about 5.5 amps, and I think in a couple of minutes here, we'll be down to about two amps of draw. So let's find out. We'll wait until the interior lights shut off. That's a good sign that the car is going back to sleep, and then we'll start checking again. Also, in the last video, when we were looking for an amp draw, everybody said I was using the meter wrong. It was set up exactly the same. My meter does check for leads, and it will tell you if the fuse is blown, so I did just what we did the last time on Angel and Jackson's car, where we were looking around, and it's working perfectly, and I didn't change any fuses, so I don't think anything was wrong. That one we diagnosed to just have a bad battery, and I think it just had a bad battery. All right, y'all, she has gone to sleep, and we are pulling two amps, which is insane. That is literally insane. It's so much power for the car to be turned off. Let's start with the seats, which are these two. This one is the driver's seat. If I can pull that out, no change, no change at all. Even with the driver's seat module powered down, we're still pulling two amps. Passenger seat, ooh, and no change. Maybe I need to wait longer. There's a chance I need to wait longer, but let's pull audio gateway. Big change. Seemed like we slowed down a little bit there. Minus 1.7, whew. Like I said, these all add up. All right, now let's pull the very last one here. This one is the security. Okay, we are still pulling down some real amperage. Guys, I just pulled every single fuse in the back, and no matter what I did, I still had two amps of current draw, basically. There was one fuse that got us down to 1.6, but that's not enough, right? That's still way too much draw. That will kill the battery super fast, so I just opened the doors back up, and of course, we gotta wait for it to go back to sleep, and then somehow I'm gonna have to try to see the meter and pull all the fuses in the front. I don't know what else to do. We just have to start pulling fuses in the front. I do know the current draws I saw on the Amphound were down here. These were the, the gateway module was one of those, so if we pull those, I think that answers all of our questions. You guys like my plan? It's all I could come up with. Put the meter on the side of the trunk, and hopefully I can read it from the front of the car, but yep, I can. We're right now, we're at minus 4.5 with all the lights on inside, since it's still waiting to go back to sleep, but as soon as the lights shut off, I'll start pulling some interior fuses, and we'll see if we can make it go to zero. How is it not one of the four common module failures on the E500? I don't get it. I have the one-off that failed like no one else's, but we're gonna figure out what's going on here in, I don't know, five minutes when these lights shut off or something like that. Then hopefully the next person with a mysterious E500 battery draw has better luck after they watch this video. There's not too many options here. I'm gonna take a look at the map one more time. I keep putting it away, but I keep needing it. We're back on track. Minus two amps right there. I think this is the ECU, so this is central gateway. No change. All right, I'm gonna try them all, let you know what happens. No way. I think it was the passenger seat module. All right, guys, I have a lot of fuses out right now. I was just gonna go through and pull every single fuse out of the fuse box because I could not get the current draw to stop. So we've got quite a few out, but this time the current dropped to minus 0.6, so it's pulling 6 tenths of an amp now, if you can see the meter all the way down there, since I pulled the passenger seat fuse. No freaking shot, look at that. It is now pulling 0.1. A couple seconds later, the car finished going to sleep and it's pulling 0.1 and all the fuses are in the back. Oh, I lied, I lied. I thought audio gateway and security were in. Let's put them back. I do want this to be a good test, so we'll put the security module back and even the audio gateway, that one goes right there. Should be number six. Now we gotta wait for everything to go to sleep again. Probably, yeah, we're pulling four amps. Let's do an open-close on the door. Look at all the fuses I got out. Woo, we are now under 1 tenth of an amp, 0.08, which means it's time to put some more fuses back in and figure out which module exactly, unfortunately I got a long wait now that I opened the door, which module exactly is killing us here. So let's tell this thing that I closed the door. Here's our door closer extraordinaire. There you go, go back to sleep. Boys and girls, we got it. Look at the meter, look at the meter, 0.13. That is a tenth of an amp. We are truly at 1 tenth of an amp, which I think is a very reasonable at-rest current draw. With the car asleep, everything's asleep. It thinks the door's closed. It thinks the trunk's closed. The audio gateway and the security module are back in and the driver's seat's back in. Every fuse is back in except for the passenger seat memory. That's it. So everything finally went to sleep, thank God. It was one of the common E500 failures. Who would've guessed? So let's hook everything back up and drive this car. I am super pumped to have a car that should start reliably. No promises, but should start reliably. 0.13. Woo, we're back after a lot of cleaning. Look underneath, it looks very nice. A lot of cleaning with the old, I forgot, the Tornador. And then a lot of cleaning in the trunk with the Tornador where I just kept getting sand and sand and sand and sand out of there. But it looks much, much, much, much, much better. So with that said, let's open our door here, find our keys, and let's take out the old E500. It's time to take it for a drive and then we'll park it, but I think it is fixed. She's alive. I think I might need to reset the battery adaptations and let's fill the washer fluid up too. Let's clear every light on the dash. Open the big door. There we go. Colby. Definitely, Colby, when you almost miss with a target that big. Are you kidding me? That wasn't enough washer fluid? I tried, I tried. Well, guys, there you have it. We found the problem with the E500. Obviously, we're like 99% sure after seeing 0.1 on the meter there. Couldn't beat that reading. I think that's where it's supposed to sit when it's asleep. And we'll find out when I try to start it two, three days from now. But for now, I'm gonna go drive the E500 for a bit, put some miles on it. I'm excited to have it back in the fleet. And I found a new module for just $35 on eBay. Not new, used, of course. But we fixed it for free. Can't beat a free fix. I mean, it needed a battery. But the battery wasn't its fault. The battery was because Grimes and I both deep cycled this thing about a million times. So that battery gave all it had to give. And I'm happy it lasted as long as it did. It got me home. And I'm sure it got him home quite a few times as well. So free, free fix with a fuse. Or we can put a seat module in it for $35 and have it totally sorted. So that is it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to head on over to shopwatchjr.com for cool shirts just like this. And please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you want to do. And I will talk to you next time. Woo! I mean, that's still a good looking car. It sucks that the bumper's been rubbed on a few things. But it's a great looking car in the sport trim. Love driving it too. It's got a good sounding sound system. You know, it's comfy. It's really a good car for two grand. Let's see how much the Mercedes leaks. It's been sitting here for two, three months. Not bad. That's not bad for three months. It's a 200,000 mile V8. I forgot the other problem this thing had. The turn signals don't auto cancel. The little ring behind the steering wheel's broken. So unfortunately, we do need to replace that. But otherwise, woo, this thing is so good. Look at this. No lights on the dash. Unbelievable. 190,000 mile car and it has no lights on the dash. Such a nice drive too. This thing is dead quiet. It was running the whole time we shot the outro. You guys can barely even hear it. Well, it's supposed to hail in a minute, but all the cars are here and running so I can officially remake the Beemer, Benz, or Bentley music video, which is all I ever wanted. That's it. Beemer, Benz, or Bentley. In one spot.