who would have guessed that i, would have, a battery problem

sooo.. haha

im thinking the alternator finally left me

or maybe my Subaru OEM battery (may be the original from 15years ago :shock: , havent checked)

anyways..the bitch wont hold a charge...i had to jump it earlier, thinking i just drained it from leaving the key "on", i drove around for an hour and a halfish, turned it off and went into the store.. came out and it was dead again... tried jumping it with a civic... half a turn over... tried jumping it with a newer jeep.. same thing... finally got a big silverado to get it started.. it took a few times... sat there at idle and felt like i was going to lose it.. drove home and parked, tried turning it on again but not even a clickclickclickclick or turnover... accessories still work for the most part..


diagnosis?

options?

[02_Legacy]

charge the battery put it in the car and measure voltage accross it with the engine running. If the alternator is good it will read above 14 volts if the alternator is bad it will read about 12 volts.

replaced the battery and got it working..we'll see what happens from here

[Robbks]

battery more than 5 years old = shagged.
if it's been flattened once, it's halved in original capacity
flatten it again, you're down to 1/4

Batteries that are very low on capacity can still have a good life-span, as long as the car fires first time and you don;t leave it on with accessories running for long periods of time. but at the first sign of a decent load/ truoble. they fail. had this happen to me recently with a 9 month old battery
the entire car now runs smoother, auto-trans shifts better and as is should

[rougeben83]

Spend the 10 bucks and get a cheap multimeter from radioshack. Read voltage while the car is on, it should be over 14volts, if not, your alternator sucks. If your battery dips below 12v with the car off, its not holding charge. There problem solved.

But most likely its your battery.

ya, no problems since battery replacement

*knocksonwood

[Robbks]

Spend the 10 bucks and get a cheap multimeter from radioshack. Read voltage while the car is on, it should be over 14volts, if not, your alternator sucks. If your battery dips below 12v with the car off, its not holding charge. There problem solved.

But most likely its your battery.

My stuffed battery was doing everything right, ~14.6v on charge whit +1000rpm, 14.2v at idle
volts were ~13.2v at rest (after sitting for an hour)

but doing a capacitive load test showed ~20% capacity
and it just could not sustain the loads of the Engine/ Auto trans/ lights/ accessories/ seat heaters.
load testing is the only sure fire way of testing a batteries capacity, and it's capacity that counts.
the multimeter will tell you that it's flat, not getting enough charge, or had dropped a Cell