So
for the past few days, my car has been through a lot of jump starting, and it
seemed like the battery was dead. Fortunately, Hans saw my car's problem
as a learning opportunity for the class.
As
usual, we did a visual inspection of the battery. The terminals were fairly
neat and clean, the cables were tidy and no leakage seemed to be anywhere on or
around the battery.
Then,
we took a multi meter and checked the voltage of the battery as the car went
through the start up process. As we
expected, the voltage dropped as the starter motor ran, and the voltage jumped
as the alternator came in.
We
then wanted to see if the car was draining the battery as the car was
completely off. To do this, we unplugged
the negative terminal and set the multi meter to 'amps', to see if there was
any current flowing as the car was completely off. The current was at around 0.45A and then
dropped to around 0.05 as the alarm was switched off. It all seemed fine so
far.
Hans
then introduced us to a handy gadget called a load tester, which was used to
simulate the starter motor and see the battery's condition as it went through
the starting procedure. The load tester
is hooked up to the battery in a parallel circuit (positive to positive,
negative to negative), and has two meters on it. A knob on the tester is used to raise the
amps being drawn out of the battery, which simulates the starter motor. The
other meter shows the voltage level of the battery.
As
Hans raised the amps on the load tester to around 200A, the voltage meter
dropped to the red zone of the meter, meaning the battery wasn't holding the
charge properly. We then knew that the
battery needed a proper full charge to be able to handle the roughage of what
the car needs from it.
At
the end of the day, the battery was removed from the charger, and was replaced
into the car. We repeated the load test
process and as the amps were raised up, the voltage didn't drop all the way to
the red zone.
Today was another lesson learned and another
dollar saved.
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