Yep, you read that right…bad battery. Two weeks ago that battery was fine. It held a charge…or seemed to. But this weekend it decided to cross over to the big battery charger in the sky. The only thing different this week from previous weeks, was I left the battery connected.
I had removed the alternator from the system by pulling the charge cable. So only the rest of the vehicle would be the only thing parasitically draining it. I didn’t think I’d have to work 32 hours out of 48 that 1st weekend, so the experiment was a little skewed.
So when I put the meter on it and it registered 0.00 volts, I was a bit bummed. I they decided I’d try to charge it with trickle charger. I hooked it up and the needle pegged to full. The alligator clips started getting hot. My thought, “That’s not right.”
It wasn’t right. I hauled the battery down to O’Reilly’s and had them test it on their fancy tester. (I need to buy one of these, hmmm….eBay?) It said the terminals were not connected. We guessed a dead cell was shorting it across the terminals. Not sure about that, but they weren’t connected.
So $242.00(US) later…when did batteries start being so expensive? Damn it seems like the last battery I bought for the Big White Bus was like 60 bucks.
So I dropped the battery in and test fired the engine. She fired up no issue.
I also ordered a new negative terminal. The off the shelf ones just suck. I’m going to try the same style my F-150 has. They work pretty well. The only thing left is to put terminals on the three ground cables. I’ll figure that out this weekend.
So next week I’ll test for the vampiric parasitic draw. Check back next week for hopefully some results.
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Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.