in my 'roo i notice that when i am at idle, and have a blinker on, the voltage guage drops when the light engages. I have /very/ little in the vehicle (not even a radio). what would be causing this? i have a brand new alternator and battery with not even 200 miles on them. what could be causing this? I put the battery to a dmm and it is doing the same on it too.

 

-j

in my 'roo i notice that when i am at idle, and have a blinker on, the voltage guage drops when the light engages. I have /very/ little in the vehicle (not even a radio). what would be causing this? i have a brand new alternator and battery with not even 200 miles on them. what could be causing this? I put the battery to a dmm and it is doing the same on it too.

 

-j

The momemtary load on the battery caused by the blinker causes the voltage on the battery to drop slightly. Unless the voltage drops when the engine rpm is at 2000 or more, it's nothing to worry about.

That's pretty typical of Subaru voltage gauges. They are sensitive to small changes in voltage like that. All of them do it to a degree. It's normal for voltage to drop slightly like that as the VR can't react instantly to changes in load.

 

GD

Mine drops 1/8" with the blinker blinks

hmm.. guess i must've never noticed it on any of my other ones (i no longer have any except this one). i know it did it with the old alternator.. bit i tossed it off as high voltage low amps issue since the alt. was bad anyway. thanks!

I've seen that behavior on alot of my subarus..... other cars, I'm not sure about, since none of them even have a voltmeter

Along with the drop in battery voltage there are the IR wire losses between the battery and the load to consider also. The smaller wires will have a slight voltage drop across them as current loads increase. The voltmeter sees these the difference. There could also be some dirty pin connections in connectors causing some loss in voltage.