How do you drain electrical energy?

Answer 1

Grounding. Short circuiting.

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This question is only appropriate when you are referring to an electronic circuit. The same principle applies to draining electrical components in household appliances or industrial machines and heavy batteries/capacitors, but the method will be many times more dangerous to the handler. Hence, it is extremely important that you don't try without the supervision of a certified electrician.

A portable electronic circuit such as a digital wrist watch or the TV remote controller uses batteries for its power source. The 1.5V (or 3V) battery will eventually drained, partly because of normal usage and partly due to "leakage." Leakage occurs when a return path to ground is inadvertently formed due to poor design, poor quality of material, or aging. One example would be a logic gate that is drawing power even when the power is turned off. Another example would be that a solder joint on the printed circuit board was poorly done, so that it has a resistive path to an adjacent solder joint of a different branch. A return path to ground is acting like a resistor connected between the positive and negative terminals. The power consumed by the parasitic resistor will drain the battery eventually. The lower the parasitic resistance, the faster the battery is being drained.

Theoretically, if you bury a battery in the soil, it will drain -- the soil is not a perfect insulator and the earth is a near-perfect ground.

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