Had to replace my battery today. Well, I’m hoping it was a battery and I’m hoping that’s all it was but when I went to start my truck this afternoon when I got back to the yard, the remote start wouldn’t work. Wasn’t sure why so I opened the door to start it manually and the flippin’ battery was dead, wouldn’t crank. Had about enough juice to power everything but no crank.
Checked the battery cables and sure enough, they were tight; should be tight because it’s the factory battery and Ive never taken the cables off. Had my buddy come over with his pickup to give me a jump and sure enough, it was dead because it took a little over 5 minutes to charge it enough to where it would even crank but even after it got to that point, it wouldn’t start, it would just crank, and crank. I guess the voltage has to be high enough in order for the fuel pump or whatever to kick on because after about another 3, 4 minutes of jumping, it finally fired up.
Drove it down to Oreileys, they put their battery checker on it but they couldn’t check it because the battery was hardly charged and sure enough when I went to start it back up, it wouldn’t crank. They had to get their portable jump starter out to start the truck. They said they could check the battery once it was charged so I drove it home, took the battery out and went back so they could charge it. Said it would take about an hour to charge it and then they said they could properly test it to see if it really was bad.
Well, they hooked up the charger and after a few seconds of the charger running it’s thing, it immediately said the battery was bad so I figured at that point, I might as well just replace the damn thing. 200 bucks for a new battery later, put it in and she cranked right up.
I’m just curious though, is it possible my battery just decided to take a crap like that outta the blue? I don’t think anything was left on because I found out right away that if you leave any lights on, including the headlights, it will shut them off as a protection.
This truck will be four years old this Christmas and I haven’t had a single problem out of the battery and yes, my truck does sit a lot, especially when I’m at work. It’s not out of the ordinary for my truck to sit at the yard all week and then I drive it home on the weekends. As I said, it’s been subject to this a lot since I bought it brand new and nothing….except for today and it was dead.
Usually if something drains a battery, you might get by with jumping it once but in my experience, if you have to jump one several times, you might as well just replace it at that point as it’s usually shot but not this time. This is the first time it went dead and that was all she wrote. Sorry for the long post but any ideas? I do have an amp powering my rear subs but it shuts off when there’s no audio signal coming from the radio so I find it hard to believe it’s that. Other than that, I don’t leave phone chargers plugged it so I have no idea where the parasitic draw would have come from if there was any. I’m stumped unless this battery just decided it didn’t want to hold a charge anymore.
