P1900 - The battery destroyer

Just thought I would post this. I really wanted to use the P1900 in standby mode but I'm afraid it's just not possible. My car pc (1st gen intel mac mini) is in a car that I drive off and on, maybe 1 week out of 3 weeks I'll daily it. So it can sit for 2 weeks at a time. Shouldn't be TOO big of a deal because of the dead man timer right? Doesn't seem so. The P1900 does something to suckle down all of the life out of the battery even after the deadman timer is hit. Brand new battery, a week or two at the shop, and the battery was completely and hopelessly dead to the point that my battery charger didn't recognize it as a battery. I have checked current consumption. After it goes to sleep it was somewhere like 100-200ma. I forget the exact number but it seemed really normal. Drawing it for 3 days and then deadman shutting down *should* be fine. I know the deadman timers works too because if I left it for a few days the pc would be fully shut down. I know most cars have 20-50ma consumption just for the radio clock. I mentioned this problem to carnetix support and they told me I shouldn't use standby. What? It's a supposed feature. Why bother having it if it doesn't work.

I am back to Hibernate mode which I suspect will work fine.

I'm disappointed. And unhappy. If a laptop with a laptop battery can sit on standby for days and only drain 20-30% of the battery what is the deal? Mac mini + centrafuse + windows + hibernate = weird startup delays and freezes and other problems. It just doesn't "feel" right without the short delays of standby. I feel like I should be able to make this work.

Any ideas?

Oh and I did verify the battery won't drain even over a LONG time with the carnetix unplugged. It's *definitely* the P1900, not a bad light switch or something else.

Yup, back in hibernate mode. Works fine, battery not getting drained. How utterly disappointing. Between, this, Centrafuse being a buggy steaming pile version after version, terrible andrea echo cancellation, and my flaky lilliput screen backlight, this stuff will *never* be consumer ready. Sorry... It seems like nobody else can say it but for me the writing is on the wall. I would never attempt to install this stuff in one of my customer cars.

Most systems will be flat after a week at such high drains. Alarmed vehicles often suffer the same.
And radio-clocks should only be mA if that - not 20-50mA. (Even a clock when displaying should only be 10mA...)


Most systems can handle a full-time LED (20mA) for a week or few.

My truck will sit occasionally for weeks on end and still start fine. It's diesel with 2 850CCA batteries though. I have seen it not be started for 3 weeks+ and still run glow plugs & fire up fine so I'm not sure if you have a specific issue with your 1900 or if I have so much reserve that I am not seeing the problem.

I wonder how many USB devices are connected to the PC that are still drawing power when the PC is in standby...

FWIW, in my car, I noticed a 200-300mA will drain a car battery in only a few days... how long do you have the deadman timer set for? Something that might be worth doing, is taking voltage measurements every few hours until the deadman timer clicks off, just to ensure you don't have it set for too long.

Deadman timer is set to 3 days. I was unaware you could change it. Ideally it should be set to the longest period of time between using the car when I am daily driving it. So from 7pm until 10am... so 13 hours. But even so, what occurs is not due to the 120mA draw. 120*24*3 = only 4.32 amps. There's NO WAY that should drain a brand new battery. And it *didn't* things were fine until it sat for weeks with the deadman timer kicking the car pc off. There's a bug in my P1900 or maybe all of them since Carnetix told me I just shouldn't use standby mode at all.

Oh and btw, I didn't come back to a battery that was sitting at 10.5V which is the cutoff. I came back to a FLAT battery. My battery charger wouldn't even recognize it as a battery. This happened to the old battery but I figured it's time was up. The P1900 is supposed to prevent in ALL situations what it causes for me. As for the USB comment, I have a GPS puck and touch panel on switched power. The only thing the USB runs in standby is my Andrea dongle. Also I have the latest firmware which is 2.6 I believe (unless they released an update)