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Got a call on a rescue unit that was eating the battery when parked, one time. Took me a while to find the culprit by disconnecting various circuits one at a time, until I got to the cigarette lighter circuit. Seems that they kept a hand spotlite connected to the lighter plug, and one of the squad members got tired of it falling out of the clip on the dash, and chucked it in the glovebox. You know the rest of the story: Switch got bumped on, and they never noticed it, even when the light got hot enough to scorch a pair of rubberized work gloves in the box. Look for the simple things first... Dome light left on, door switches not shutting off, auxilliary electronics left on, etc. A radar detector and a 2-way radio will run my oversized battery down in a day and a half. Also had an alternator do it to me: everything worked fine as long as wife drove to work, grabbed her stuff, and exited out the driver's door. If she went around and opened the passenger's door, the voltage regulator in the alternator would sense the voltage drop, and energize the field coil, even when ignition was off. In her 8 hour work shift, she'd come back to a dead battery. Took me a while to figure that one out! Had just had that alternator rebuilt, and rebuilder put all new electronic components in it. Funny thing was, he ended up putting two more regulators in and they both failed the same way. Finally went back, raided his junk pail, found old regulator, and reinstalled that -no more problems!
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