car car car

[jwgh]

Last March my battery died, and I got a new one. The new one had a bad cell and died a week later, so I got a free replacement one from the same place.

Last night around 11:30 pm or so I was driving home in the rain and stopped at a gas station. When I tried to start the car again, the starter barely cranked over, and I had to get a jump.

Today I went back to the battery guy, who did some tests and proclaimed that the battery's fine, but that there's a short somewhere in the electrical system. Unfortunately, that seems kind of plausible.

So. The first thing to do is to clean off the terminals and connectors and see if that fixes the problem. (While I'm at it I'll peer around to see if there are any obvious spots where the wires are damaged.) I really need not to get stranded someplace over the next couple of days, so until then I'll unhook one of the terminals overnight so the battery doesn't run down. After that I'll try leaving the terminals hooked up and see if I have any problems. Of course I may need to wait until it rains again to give it the real test.

If that doesn't do the trick, I'll call around and see if there's a place around that will diagnose this kind of thing and see what it costs.

The car is thirteen years old, so I have to figure out how much money I want to spend on keeping it going. On the other hand, apart from this problem it's been quite reliable. (It's a '94 Toyota Corolla with about 115,000 miles on it.)

Buying a new car has its attractions, although paying for a new car doesn't. Hmm. Well, we will see, and regardless, it won't hurt to start putting some money aside into a new car fund.

Comments

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

a new-to-you car might be where it's at. do new cars fare well in your n'hood?

but at the same time - you're driving a toyota. they're not *quite* as good as hondas, but it'd probably last you a good while longer.

[jwgh]

I think so -- my car has been stolen in the past, but that was while I was parked on Angell Street.

When Priuses first came out they were weird enough that nobody wanted to steal them (for instance I'm not sure if they can be jump-started by conventional means), but I don't know if that is still the case.

But you're right, anecdotally there seem to be lots of Toyotas out there with twice as many miles on them as mine.

[katrinkles.livejournal.com]

that's really not a lot of miles for a fifteen year old car. especially when it's a toyota.
my saab has more than 250,000 miles on it and it's still running fine.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

How many does your bike have?

[katrinkles.livejournal.com]

at least a million more than that!

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

See, I was following you til this point:

Today I went back to the battery guy, who did some tests and proclaimed that the battery's fine, but that there's a short somewhere in the electrical system. Unfortunately, that seems kind of plausible.

So. The first thing to do is to clean off the terminals and connectors

See, the problem I have is that cleaning contacts is not going to remove a *short circuit*. Unless you merkans do the same thing to the word "short" as you do to the word "gas" when you really mean "liquid" petroleum.

[jwgh]

My concern is that if I take the car to the shop and tell them the battery is draining and I think it might be a short, and the terminals are dirty, then the first thing they'll do is clean the terminals and see if that does anything. So I might as well take care of that up front.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see; you're approaching it in that direction.

A lot of people seem to use "short" when they mean "open", which may also result from dirty terminals (dirty with non conducting stuff as opposed to conducting stuff that bridges the terminals).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm adding noise to this issue, but in my experience, a battery and an alternator, upon either going bad, will generally murder the other by putting a giant load on it and just take up the rest of its lifespan. On two cars in my family, we've replaced one within days of replacing the other.


Naturally if you ever have an encounter with The Other, wield a bad alternator.

alternator magic

[notr.livejournal.com]

When I had an alternator go bad, a friend helped me take it apart, find nothing wrong with it, put it back together, and magically have it work fine for the rest of the life of the car (quite untragically cut short the next year by bald tires on damp roads at 10 MPH).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a friend of mine, whose dad was a mechanic and who, upon discovering the state of my friend's electrical system (a car from the 1970s or early 80s), re-wired it entirely using what he had at hand: a single spool of yellow wire. Every single wire was replaced.

Naturally, that was the very last fix that would ever be possible on that car's electrical system. It's easy to imagine a look of horror as some other mechanic looked behind the dash to see only yards of the same wire running everywhere.