I thought I was the only one

I have an '04 (new style) and a Wal-Mart battery I put in in January. Recently. after a week at the airport or the body shop, not driven much, the truck has difficulty starting.

Battery will charge to 12.55V. Dips down to maybe 12.1 overnite. Running voltage is 14.4V. Wal-Mart did their little test and says the battery is fine, told me to have the charging system checked. It checks out fine.

I get 330mA draw with the key off. I thought that was high but everybody says, for an F-150, under 500mA is fine. The 330mA matches what IeeeRaider gets for his keep-alive so I don't feel so bad. I don't think that would be so bad considering I often keep a ham radio transciever powered up overnight, it's standby current is about 450mA, and I used to be able to start up the truck fine after a day or two.

If I can't get Wal-Mart to replace the battery I will bite the bullet and get a real good one -- any recommendations? Maybe I shouldn't buy Wal-Mart batteries any more.

 

Unless I'm way off in the order of magnitude department again, your 330 mA draw is 1/3 Amp, which is almost 8 Amps per day. That's a HUGE draw. Yes, in two days, you only pulled 16 Amps out of the battery, but in 6 days, it's 48 Amps and your battery is just about dead (if it was fully charged at the start).

I think something is ON that needs to be OFF (when your key is off).

And, your battery voltages tell me your battery is dying or is under a fairly heavy constant load.

- Jack

 

How did Walmart check the battery ? Unless they pulled it and put a load tester on it, they did not really test is.

If the battery only charges to 12.55 V, there is something up with it ( when running voltage is 14.4 ), add that overnight it drops to 12.1 V, that is bad.

You can try the test yourself, pull the battery and put a trickle charger on it for ~ 4 hours. Remove the charger and check, you should have north of 12.6 V ( actually on a new battery it should be closer to 13.2 V ).

Let it sit ( with nothing on it ) and check it every hour. If it drops to 12.1 out of the truck overnight, that is not the truck's charging system or the truck, that is the battery.

I don't trust the batteries from Walmart, nor for the most part their "mechanics". Both seem to be questionable.

 

Lo and behold... after one hour with the ammeter in series, the key-off current draw was down to 20mA, presumably when the ECU shuts down. Nice. Just proved it wasn't a problem with the battery discharging due to parasitic loads or a bad diode in the alternator... With the charging voltage at 14.3 volts (14.1 with lights and AC on), and the 20mA parasitic current load, the battery should have not discharged itself so much....

Back to Wal-Mart today... for a few hours. Still passed their tests and they could not offer me a warranty replacement. They offered to let me keep my truck there overnight to prove to them that the discharge occurred without the battery being hooked up, or to bring the battery in the next day... A few more hours at Wal-Mart just didn't seem appealing... it was a nice offer but I had already put way too much work into making sure my truck was OK... so I bit the bullet and went next door and bought a yellow top. It was 12.4 volts when I bought it but it charged nicely up to 12.85.

 

Seein' 20:20 aren't ya Scully?

 

It was more so supposition and the info provided.
But looking at Walmart products ( that cheap and it is the "same" ) and the staff ( tested good at 12.5 after running ) with a jaundice eye, I can only come to 1 conclusion, you get what you pay for ( at least that is what dad taught me ). In this case, very little.

 

I have the same problem on a 05 F150. Durning warm weather I have no problem as soon as the temp drops it is dead in the morning after being parked for the weekend. I have switched batteries with my Jeep that was siting for 6 months. Truck started right up put truck battery in Jeep and let it charge. After the next weekend the truck was dead and the Jeep started fine. Switched back and had the same results. Also showing about 350Ma draw when parked. I only drive 1 1/2 miles to work each way and was thinking that it was not getting a full charge. This has been going on for 5 years at home I plug in the battery tender when parked for the weekend

 

Again, a 350 mA key off draw is too high. This is tricky to measure, because it has to be with the ammeter in series on the battery circuit and after all the electronics in the truck have gone to "sleep".

The problem is that disconnecting the battery to wire in the ammeter will wake some of these things up and you may get a very high draw when you first reconnect everything - it could be high enough to blow the ammeter fuse, depending on what you have onboard.

But, it sounds to me like your alternator and battery are fine. And, the battery tender is certainly a "bandaid" that will keep the battery charged. An alternator is really not designed to recharge a deeply discharged battery, it is only supposed to restore the drain caused by starting. In fact, you can ruin an alternator by forcing it to deliver power to a "dead" battery (if there's an internal short), because the draw on the alternator will be so high.

Do you have some aftermarket electronics on board?

- Jack

 

So, I have had the same problem with my truck after sitting for 5 or 6 days also. The truck just does not want to turn over. I ended up diconnecting the negative terminal and hooking up the Fluke in series from the post to the cable. The Fluke probe were plugged into the 10A and Common ports, and set to the mA A setting. The reading that it showed after waiting 20 minutes was 0.002. So I connected my Gryphon and satellite radio and I-pod charger back in and let sit for 20 minutes and the reading went up to 0.003. I am no electrician, so my question is, am I doing something wrong? This is the second yellow top that I have had. I placed the battery on a tender overnite and disconnected the next morning and went to work. I came home 9 hours later and put the battery on the charger and it read at 95% charged, so I took it off the charger and hooked up the Fluke and it read 12.60 volts. Started it up and it read 14.35 volts. Any input?

 

Do you have a phone charger? I think mine ended up being my phone charger