New Battery

[kevin_standlee]

When we started getting the Rolling Stone ready for use again thanks to the work Lisa was doing on the Astro, initially the van wouldn't start at all. We figured that was because it had set for nearly a year. Lisa put the van on the battery charger and all seem well, although we had the setback with the power windows. After Lisa fixed that window regulator, I started using the RV while she undogged the Astro and looked into the issue with the EGR valve. Unfortunately, the day before yesterday, the RV wouldn't start again. It had some power, but not enough to start the vehicle.

This afternoon, Lisa pulled the vehicle battery (there's a separate "hotel" battery for the RV appliances) and we took it over to O'Reilly, where we bought this one originally in January of 2021. When we got there, we realized that we were still within the 36 month warranty period for this battery. It took them a little while, but they were able to eventually find my original purchase, and we did a like-for-like swap, saving me more than $200. Lisa bought a new battery cable (just in case) and we headed for home.



Here's the new battery in place, including the new positive battery cable.

The RV started up immediately. That's one of the few times a warranty has worked for anything I've bought. But perhaps I should run the vehicle at least once a month from now on even if I'm not using it as regularly as I was when I was living out of it in the Bay Area.

Comments

Trickle charger?

[lsanderson]

A trickle charger works as well if you have a place to plug it in. A low level discharge is discouragingly hard to find.

Re: Trickle charger?

[kevin_standlee]

Lisa does have a trickle charger. We tried multiple things on this issue. I did not list every single thing that Lisa did. Given that it simply wouldn't hold a sufficient charge to start the vehicle, Lisa thinks that one of the cells in the battery failed.