Ticking relay with vehicle OFF?!

Ok so I get the truck up and running. Driving around today grabbing the parts to throw a kill switch in. I'm sitting outside my house waiting for a friend to arrive who plans to help out. Stupidly, I had my cell phone plugged in without the engine running and managed to kill the battery.

Friend arrives and we connect the (cheapo - sorry, my heavy gauge got babes in the break-in) cables (dead positive, live positive, dead negative, live negative) and he fired up his engine.

After about 30 seconds we realize there is smoke coming off the cables. We hastily cut his engine and yank the cables as quickly as I could get some work gloves on.

After things cool, I notice a ticking sound. Mind you, the key isn't even in the ignition. I travel the ticking to the engine compartment fuse box and finally to the headlight relay. That's when I noticed that the headlights (and interior lights) are pulse with the ticking (albeit very dimly). I put the key in and turn it to the on position and the ticking stops. Turn it off and pull the keys, and the ticking and pulsing starts again. I disconnect the negative terminal and the ticking stops. I pull the relay, reconnect, and nothing to note happens(other than the truck still not starting, of course). Push the relay back in and ticking starts. Disconnect battery... This went on for a bit.

Anywho, what the heck did I screw up and how is the relay ticking and lights pulsing with the vehicle off??

 

your cellphone can't kill a runner battery, your battery was probably already dead or had other heavy load on it.
my guess is a short somewhere, or a bad relay, hence your lights on with no keys
i would start there and work it out. i doubt you fried anything. it is worth do get a scanner too, might find out some codes.

 

The truck was off while I was charging.

 

I think what he meant was that a USB charger runs at 5 volts, typically about 2amp max. At that voltage it would produce 10 watt hours. A normal battery would be able to supply approximately 75 amp/hours (ah). Convert that for 12V to approximately 900 watt hours (wh for short), and then divide by 50% because you typically don't want to run your battery below 50% charge, and you're at 450 wh. It would then take 450 wh / 10 wh = 45 hours to drain your battery with a load on the phone.

This makes a lot of assumptions, but makes the point that if your battery was health, and your phone was thirsty, you'd still not be able to do that in 2 days, much less while you were waiting in your car.

I think you got some other electrical issues to resolve for sure.

One final thought, smoking battery cables likely meant issue with connection (they might have not had a solid bite on the terminals), or the gauge of the jumpers were far too small for the amp load across the wires for the length of wire or time they were delivering those amps. Smoking indicates failure. I'd scrap those cables for safety.

 

Would it make a big difference if it was 12V @ 4.5A? The phone (and plug) are Qualcomm Fast Charge.

No worries on the cables. One on the straight up melted off before we could safely detach. I had a set of heavy guage cables, but those were lost when the truck was broken into 2 weeks ago.

 

Nah. 4.5Amps will still give you a day's worth of charging.

Your battery is/was toast...or you have a short somewhere.

If the battery is shorted internally, that could cause this.

Get that battery tested/replaced.

If it were me, I think I would do the following:

I would then, go and test for a short on the positive battery cable to ground using your multimeter.

Then I would check all the circuits by testing for shorts to ground at the fuse box on every fuse. You should not find a circuit where both sides of the fuse registers as a connection to ground.

Then when you put the battery back in...you want to test for a parasitic drain before hooking up the cables. You do this by putting your multimeter IN SERIES with the battery and one of the battery cables.

Hopefully if you have a short, you've found it before testing for parasitic drain. Because if it's a bad short, it could blow your multimeter. Maybe use a test light instead.

 

Negusm is right. Peukert's Law states the greater the load on the batter, the less realized capacity you'll have. However, 2A to 4.5A compared to the 1C rate of 75Ah is like a 3% difference, so it's pretty linear. So just take the 45 hour estimate and slice by 2.5x and you'll at like 20ish hours. That's assuming it's charging constantly, at some point the phone will be charged and the draw will stop.

Sorry for the so-so math but I'm not trying to be exact here, just illustrating we think the problem lies elsewhere. I hope you can track it down. I'd certainly start with the battery. A low battery can possibly make relays click.

 

SO going back to the headlight thing. I would test out the headlight circuit before putting the battery back in. I'm thinking there is something reversed/shorted in the steering column you put in. Based on the description:

You were getting power to the headlights with NO KEY and (i am assuming) the headlight switch was set to OFF.
Dome lights are the same deal. Blinking with key OUT.
When the key is set to ON, the headlights AND dome light stop clicking and appear to have no power.
You have NO security system?

Are the dome lights on the same circuit as the headlights? I don't think so...and if not...then I would look at the steering column again. It's the most logical if the ignition key is affecting 2 circuits. You may have a bad key cylinder. Did you replace it? Did you get it from TOYOTA or cheap Chinesium?

 

So yeah, looking at a 4Runner fuse box...there are actually multiple fuses for the headlights and dome light. So for everything to blink like that, with the key out, makes me think you still have a steering column issue.