so i had to jump my truck yesterday for a dead battery. the wife said while i was deployed that it would die every other day weather she drove it or not. i took it to have the charging system checked and when i drove it down there (after it was jumped and a 15 min drive after letting it run first for about 10 min.) it was completely dead. the test said there was a bad diod so he asked if i could take it off and bring it back to have it bench checked. did that this morning and when they tested it they said it was fine. no problems. so now i have no idea. i have a brand new optima red top in there about a week old and i disconnected my subs and all before i left.

 

My money's on the Optima being bad. They're no where near as good as they used to be and there's no shortage of posts/threads around here from people that have had bad ones.

 

X2. Sounds to me like when your vehicle is running its actually running off of the alternator not the battery. If you shut it off after running for 15 minutes and it not able to re-start with a good alternator your battery is not holding a charge.

 

i went yesterday to have it charged and check so im going to pick it up today and see what happens. but my question is where does the bad diode come in when i had it check the first time?


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so i went to pick up the battery and they said when they first hooked it up to the charger it kicked it off. they tried again and it took. it charged all night and they tested it infront of me and it checked good, but it wasnt fully charged. now im completely stumped! any help would be appreciated.

 

Have them charge it overnight, then let it sit a day, and THEN test it.

If its not holding a charge it might test OK immediately after they unhook it from the charger, but if you let it sit it will bleed down and not work... which a new battery should not do.

 

well when i picked it up it was sitting on the shelf dont know how long but... and i put everything back in my truck. when i was putting the battery back in i connected the positive and when i went to check that it was on there good and tight i noticed the cable that goes from the terminal to the alternator was not even tight.i could take the nut off with my hand no problem. so that makes me wonder if it was even getting a good contact. and i know i never touched that part of the terminal. i asked my wife when she took it to autozone if they took it out or if one of my buddies helped her and she said autozone did so it makes me wonder if they accidently loosened the wrong nut and never tightened it back up which led to all the problems.

 

Could be the battery but my bet was the alternator wasn't charging it. I had a similar experience with my Nissan a month ago. My mom drove it for 10 min, it died and I put a good battery in it. It died again the next day. Took it to the mechanic and it was the alternator that was bad. He replaced it and then 2 days later, the car killed the battery again. He had to replace the alternator with yet another one because the readings were all over the place on the first replacement. I'm saying that people always assume that it is the battery, but the alternator is what charges the battery so that could have also been the problem. FYI: Autozone has guys that have no clue what they are doing, so I wouldn't be surprised if they had something to do with your problems.

 

im gonna have it checked here after a bit. im going to let my truck sit to see if the battery dies a bit or what. but im not going to rule out that the alternator is or is going bad.