F355 Dead battery

I just did me 355 battery, the interstate battery is a great battery
Mike NJ. 355 GTS

 

I just went through this on stone dead battery from the winter. I went and bought a new 34R Interstate and kept the old one as it was less than 2 years old and I just felt it wasn't in the grave yet. If your battery is of known age and you think it is less than 6 years , read on.

As I learned with a generator battery from the guy in the service shop for small equipment, your regular battery charger or your trickle charger that are of the "smart" variety will not charge stone dead batteries. They need to see some life in them before they will charge it. The regular charger will throw a fault code of internally shorted battery. The trickle charger will do something similar but just wont charge it.

This is what I did for my ice cold battery and it is now on the tender with a solid green light for two weeks.

First if you are inclined, go to HF and get a $60 jump box. It will come in handy for a lot of the things around the house and is good to have.

Fully charge it and then hook it up to your dead battery and leave it alone for a 24 hours.

Then hook up a regular battery charger and it will now fully charge the battery. Again leave it on for 24hours.

Then put the battery on your trickle charger and watch the lights. Blinking green means it is charging, solid green means it is charged.

You can pull your battery and do this or do it through the posts in the engine bay.

I now have a perfectly good spare battery and am light $140 because I was impatient in doing the above.

 

I just charged mine by connecting to the positive lead to one of the + terminals under the passenger side engine compartment splash panel. I clipped the negative lead to the transaxle case. It took at least 8 hours.

 

I will add one other thing to my experience as well. I was sure that I had left that I had the car on the trickle charger all winter although I admit to never monitoring the lights to see if it was working.

In putting in the new battery and removing the one I had personally put in 2 years ago, i noticed some rusting of the rings of the trickle charger on the battery post. I flipped the rings around so that i could better get a 1/2" socket on the the terminal nuts and retightened them.

I don't know if that was my issue but the car with the new battery is now on the trcikle charger as well and is solid green and I glance at the lights on the charger every time i walk through the garage now.

If you are going through the process above, take the time to check your battery connections and make sure they are good.

 

Doesn't the existing battery have a warranty? If it went dead after 4 days with the interior lights on you can hardly blame the battery. Some times they will come back, some time not.

 

Just a note, once a battery has been fully drained/killed, they usually suffer 'some' irepairable damage. Ferrari here in western Canada at least, said they had changed out around 5 a week(Ferrari factory batteries) that are about a year or two old, and putting in Interstate. Try an overnight full 10 amp charge, check levels first if possible, then a trickle charge a day. Disconnect, take amp reading, probably 13+ volts, let sit overnight or a day and recheck 'rest voltage', what it stabilizes at. Then trickle charge again and leave on a tender, see if it saves it (of course, clean posts/clamps and grease them up as well)