car battery life

[ferretkona]

Supposed to use only purified water in batteries.

Many garages keep a pot of hot tap water on hand. Pour the hot water over the battery to rinse dryed acid deposits off. Does not need to be boiling, just hot. Make sure to keep the caps on when rinsing the battery.

[tstone]

I've killed 3 batteries on my project car by adding regular tap water under the covers. If you overfill & it spills out onto the frame it will also cause some mad surface rust. I've learned the hard way that if it says "maintenance free" and has removable covers, don't mess with them.

[jjc49mc]

Vehicles need the battery in them,running a vehicle with a weak battery will cause other electronics to fail and burn out.If you take a battery out of a vehicle it will shut down and if you do not follow procedure it could get very costly.

Originally Posted by pinetreecity

I'm not so sure. I had a factory battery go bad



on a 98 Nissan Altima. A stranger was kind enough to help me with a jump start. Right when I was ready to back out and head to Sears, I made the mistake of turning on the radio. The engine immediately died, and I had to wait for another stranger to come along and help me jumpstart the car again. After that, I didn't touch anything except the pedals until I reached the Sears store.

BTW, are there any gadgets in existance that are used to test a car batteries health. Most cars these days don't have the little battery gauge, and I want to test the battery every now and then instead of waiting until the day the car won't start to know if the battery is getting weak.