More Strange Issues, This Time Electrical related.
 

So after the dealer replaced my engine with the remanufactured one, they took it for a test drive overnight. They said the battery was dead and leaking acid when they went to start it in the morning. They had to jump it to get it back to the dealer.

When I picked it up it started fine. I was going to warranty the battery because It was an Optima Red Top 35R. I tested the battery and apparently it was just low on a charge. I figured a light was left on and that drained the battery. It was odd that the positive terminal had some corrosion on it though.

About a week went by with no problems. Everything seemed fine.

Then on Wednesday night, I parked the car, still no problems. I came back to it about three hours later. I opened the trunk and loaded it up. The light was fine inside of there. I got in the car, the interior lights were on, I put the key in the ignition and the radio came on. But when I went to start it, anything electrical went dead. No radio, no lights, no power locks, no windows, nothing.

That seemed very odd to me because I had some interior electric, then it went completely dead.

So I jumped the car and let it idle for a little bit. After about five minutes I went to drive and I got about 100 feet. It ran sort of funny then it died again and stalled out.

I put a Diehard battery in and it is running fine.

In order to warranty the Redtop though, I need to have a print out that says it is bad. So I hooked it up to a tester/charger and it said it again was just low and needed to be charged. The total charge time was only five minutes though.

I haven't hooked the Redtop back up yet, the Diehard has been running fine for about 25 miles now.

I kind of feel like there is a short somewhere. I am hoping something happened internally to the Redtop and it is just being a bitch to diagnose. The Redtop is a year old, so it should be fine.

If there was a short in the car somewhere, how long would it take to creep up again? I have the redtop in my trunk just in case I get stuck somewhere.


Thanks.

It's not a short. A short that was across the battery would just literally evaporate. If you put a wrench across a car battery it melts. There's nothing in the car that can short out your battery and survive.

What you describe sounds like a really bad connection to the battery with a lot of corrosion or something. The low current stuff in the car is fine (lights, radio) but then once you try and pull 200 amps it just all goes out because the connection was so bad and that current draw does in the connection.

If your battery is low on acid it will hold very little power. This could be your problem too. It shows low but charges in 5 minutes makes no sense for a good battery, but it's the way a battery would act if it only had 10% of the capacity left. This would cause the same deal- low power stuff works, but the instant you hit the starter, you drain the battery all the way and now there's no voltage to run anything until you charge it again.

I'd think Optima would take a report of "uncharged battery charged in 5 minutes" as a pretty obvious sign that the battery is dead.

Hmm... Thanks for the input. The positive terminal definatly had a fair amount of corrosion on it.

Is there any way to determine the capacity left in the battery? I wonder if any of the cells are disconnected internally.

Thanks again! Good input

Most independant battery shops have a battery tester that can charge and discharge a battery and find the CCA and capacity. It sounds like either you have a sulfite problem on the plates of the Optima, it has a high internal resistance problem, your clamps or battery cables are bad, or your alternator is dead.

The behavior you found was typical of a barely charged battery. It has enough juice to power the lights but not enough to actually crank the car. Many times with a dead battery a car alternator can't charge it because the internal resistance gets too high. You need to either charge it with a dedicated charger or toss it and get a new one.