Often overlooked battery maintenance

Good information mixed in with a sales pitch .

Glass mat lead acid batteries these days are a few bucks more than wet batteries. No Reason to buy wet anymore .
I’ve never ever “buckled the plates” when jump starting or force charging a battery
Even small lawn tractor batteries.
Battery cut off to avoid a fire ?
Who thinks of popping the front hood to shut off a cutoff on a runaway electrical fire ?
How does one know it’s electrical in the first place ?

Inert gas fire extinguishers are the best but very expensive and eco unfriendly unless CO2 .

I’ve never ever heard of that credit card type security system before .
This is a great idea !

 

Get Braille or Antigravity lithium battery to fix the problem .

 

Many classic car alternators do not put out the higher voltage necessary to keep the glass mat agm batteries at full charge. If your alternator is not rated higher than 14 volts, stay with the old wet lead acid.

 

Or change the voltage regulator...

But at the end of the day when you pack more power in the same case, reliability will suffer. I now have a regular Exide battery in my 400i, actually the biggest that could fit in the battery tray (so an EA900), it packs more CCA than a spiral wound (optima), almost twice more Ah, and has been in the car for the last 3 years (managed to crank the V12 yesterday -1°C). And it's so cheap (104€ delivered to my door) that whenever it will show some weakness, I will replace it. Only downside it weights a ton (20kg).

 

This is all well and good but at least 50% of the cars that show up in the shop have loose battery terminals and the battery mounted only by virtue of gravity.
We really need to try to educate people that pushing down and twisting is not cutting it before we start talking about different battery types and their advantages.

First thing I do when I open the hood the first time is grab a cable and yank on it. More often than not one or both come off.

 

Like Brian said, always check the terminals for proper tightness, because if these terminals loosen while driving; a voltage spike may have destructive overvoltages that could cause failure of many vehicle electronics!

 

For starters those fragile Japanese alternators cant take it.

 

I'll second what Brian said above about having solid connections (both at the battery and grounds in general around the chassis) and how critical that is.

I've seen several cases recently where the entire failure was due to poor surface contact / connection.

A bit ago someone called me out to help them jump a car. They were not able to do it and I was confused as to why this was so hard. I asked the person to show me what they were doing to see if we could duplicate the failure. I watched them clamp the cables on the terminals, but just lightly clamp down. Sure enough, the car with the dead battery wouldn't crank over. I removed the jumper cables and clamped them down just ever so slightly harder and twisted (in order to bite the cable teeth into the terminals and break through the oxidation layer on the posts) and said, "Okay, try now" - sure enough the car cranked right over. Good connections matter when you have a lot of amps (electrons) trying to move.

Just recently bought a used Lexus ES300 for my girlfriend (she bought it, but I helped her locate it). She called me from LA a few months later saying it was flashing a red "battery" warning light on the dash. Told her pull over right away and send me pics of the cables to the battery and alternator. Sure enough, burn spot on the plastic cover that goes over the main B+ post on the alternator. I sent her some diagnostic tools in the mail, along with an electrical power probe, and walked her through some standard diagnostic tests. After some probing and checking, we found the issue: someone had installed a new alternator, but failed to clean the rust off the main post (and didn't tighten down the M6 retaining nut for the main harness). This resulted in electrical arcing, which burned the surfaces under the cable where it needed to make contact with the alternator post - this caused a downward spiral until output alternator output (as read in the harness) was 3 volts, despite the alternator itself outputting 12+ volts at idle (when measured at the post itself using a probe tip to cut through the rust).

A couple years ago my truck occasionally would fail to crank over. Given the entire engine / wiring harness rebuild I had just completed, I was slightly shocked by this. When it happened for the second time, I started to investigate. Found the tiniest spot of green oxidation on the brass contacts between the main harness and the starter solenoid - almost nothing, but it was enough to occasionally cause issues.

Clean, solid connections make a huge difference.

Ray


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You were able to talk your girlfriend through diagnosing and repairing the electrical problem with her Lexus? I hope that you are going to marry her!

 

Haha.. not really the marrying type But yeah, she did a good job running a bypass cable and all. I was impressed how well she did actually. We just went step by step over text with video and pics.

Ray