Battery Voltage

[carbob]

So this one's a bit of a mystery. The battery was getting to be 7 years old and voltage around 12.2v so I decided to replace it at my friendly Interstate Battery store about a month ago. I put all the cars on Battery Tenders when not driving for a few days, which is more often now, and immediately I knew something was wrong after the new batter was in. I was getting 12.2v. Even with the tender overnight it would only go up to about 12.6v, the other new battery in another car gets to 13.1v after an overnight charge. So I took it back and when they measured 12.1v they gave me a new battery, said they had never seen that before in 25 years of working there, clearly it was not just a bad cell. After a few days the new battery was reading 13v after an overnight charge and the voltage with the car at idle is 14.3v so I think the alternator is good. No evidence of a voltage drop because of a device left on or a gremlin. Has anyone seen that type of battery issue before?

BTW, if you're wondering how I checked the battery voltage, for those of you that may not know about this product, you can connect Battery Tender quick disconnects on all your batteries to make it easy to connect and disconnect a tender, but they also make a small $15 device that connects to the quick disconnect and reads voltage, I use it to quickly check voltage on all my batteries periodically, just to make sure things are ok. See picture below of this little voltage meter.

[andrewwynn]

Good catch on the battery. That battery would have likely worked just fine but for 2 less years


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro