Prevention
A popular lesson for modern cars is: recharge your car battery regularly, especially if you drive short distances. A permanently “dead” car battery is destroyed and used up, you won’t damage anything by recharging, and you can buy a basic one for a few hundred automatic loaderwhich makes the whole process much easier.
It’s also a good idea to take into account that the battery you’re looking for has some life limit. You can take care of it as best you can, but one day it will simply stop providing enough current to start and it will download very quickly. If your car battery is of good quality, lasts 8-12 years. The worst are the pieces from supermarkets, where there is a big lottery and you never know how long the battery has been in storage before you buy it and in what condition. Usually, however, the accumulator lasts 4-5 yearsfor example during heavy traffic only 2 years. It is therefore worth distinguishing between a situation in which your car battery has only been discharged and once it has been charged with a charger, it can still function for a few more years and between the end of its useful life. This happens when even charging doesn’t help and in a day or two the battery drains again or shows signs of voltage drop.
How to recognize a dead car battery?
- It starts worse – as soon as the starter has to turn longer than before, it is possible that the battery does not have it sufficient tension. Along with a longer boot, it’s also common to know the starter turns more slowly. If it runs normally at first, then slows down, try charging the battery, it should help. But be careful that not only the car battery can be the cause of worse starts, the starter motor, glow plugs, injectors are also to blame…
- When the car won’t start at all – the click of the starter relay only reveals that the starter is not turning for some reason. The cause can also be a malfunction, most often it is a dead car battery. You can still try Turn on the lightswhich will light up less than usual and after a few seconds it will start to go out.
- Voltmeter – whether purely with a voltmeter or a multimeter, the point is to measure the voltage at the poles of the car battery. Everything below 12.45V it is negative due to the resulting sulfation, even if the car will still have to be started quite willingly, in any case recharge the battery as soon as possible. The correct voltage of the car battery is 12.6-12.8 volts. As soon as the voltage drops below 12V, the battery is discharged. You can also measure when you start the car – have someone start the car and measure the voltage across the poles. If it drops below 9.6 volts, it is sulphated battery and cannot supply sufficient current. You can try the desulphation mode, which some chargers have, but this will remove the more permanent sulphation only partially.
Like getting into a car with a dead battery
Luckily, manufacturers think about it (mostly) and it’s not a bad idea to study it in the car manual. But it’s usually in the box in front of the passenger, right? Look carefully at what you use to remotely unlock your car: while it’s not visible on modern ones, they usually contain a classic mechanical key under some sort of cover. It fits into a lock that is hidden from most from the driver’s door handle, always usually under the cover, which needs to be removed or folded back (especially don’t lose the cover!). Then follows the classic unlocking of the doors, which also allows you to unlock the front hood, where you can get to the car battery, or the possibility of connect to charger.
Does your car battery run out repeatedly?
If the situation with a dead car battery is not unusual and even after buying a new one, it repeats, start solving the problem. There is probably something in the car’s wiring that is constantly using energy. It is often something homemade dimming, backlighting and the like. It can also cause a short circuit or serious contamination of the car battery. A healthy battery, if the vehicle’s electrical system is in order, should be healthy even after a month of standstill able to start the engine.
Source of information: Autoaku.
Media source: Depositphotos.
