Can You Drain the Drain tTme?

[rmoore]

Received a question about Power Backfeeding that is interesting. here's the original question followed by my reply;

"Ron,

Thanks for so many years of education about vehicle extrication. I have used and taught many of your ideas and techniques over the years, to make my crew more efficient and safe.

I just watched your podcast from Firehouse San Diego on electrical systems and a thought came to me. You made an excellent point on disconnecting any charging devices so that they won't feed back into the capacitor for the airbags. Would it be possible to use the same concept to plug in a power draining device into the lighter port to drain the capacitor after the batteries have been disconnected? Perhaps a high energy flash light or other power device that could be used to fully drain the electrical system after the batteries were taken out of the equation."

My reply is that due to diodes in this electrical circuitry, trying to drain down the drain time is not feasible. Take away the power and then it's just the passage of time that makes things get better. The average drain time for a late-model vehicle capacitor is two to five minutes; some a short as one second.