Need a new battery

Costco sell bosch batteries at a sensible price

will check them out.

I found a place that fits tyres near me today who do new batteries (varta ones) for £60 inc fitting and proper disposal of the old battery is that a good deal ?

I've never changed a car battery before but I would imagine I just copy whats done onto the new battery if I do it myself ?

whats a good prices for a battery if I go hunting for one myself ?

ta

Depends on type of battery , size of battery etc , £60 does seem reasonable

Proper fitting of a battery on a modern car is not just unbolt one and replace the new. The electrical system should be kept powered up during the whole process, which does of course involve a third battery to do conveniently, so by the sound of it you should get it fitted for you.

Mrcheerful

Oh I see. I think I should get it properly done before I end up rolling my car home down a hill.

I used to have a mini which was incredibly simple and easy to sort out I just undid the + - bolt connector things and replaced and did up with a little bit of grase on the connectors and worked fine. But then again they are very different cars :)

I'll leave it to someone who knows what they are doing.

ta

Although the third battery can be a cheapy PP3 9V battery (like the ones you put in a household smoke alarm) with a diode in series if you know what you're doing.

Nope, the car will start, you;ll just spend 36hrs of your life on the internet trying to get the radio to work again :-)

You are in luck. Tayna is offering a special price on 063 at the moment. £32 + £8 delivery.

I think the 063 is the PCInumber.

Going by the brand name is very confusing. Under the label, the battery may not be the one you think it is. Read here: "Battery Manufacturers and Brand Name List" (Updated 5 days ago!)

Lead-acid battery is a mature technology. Unless I am proved wrong with publicly available peer-reviewed statistics, I can confidently state that all the different brands have identical performance. You pay extra for the high profiled names. Appearance (therefore image) counts too. Look at the Bosch ones on here: 't that give you more confident in the product, compared to Tayna's? "The Numax car battery came out as the best budget car battery in AutoExpress magazine's 29th October - 4th November 2003 edition." 3/5 down page The precaution you need to take in disconnecting a car battery is laid out clearly in Haynes' Service and Maintenance Manual (and touched on in several respondents). The old battery can be disposed of in the local municipal tip (Enquire from your local council, refuse collection/disposal unit).

But, before you do anything, are you sure the the battery is dead? "When is a lead-acid dead!"

"Confidence", not "confident".

Different brands when new should have similar performance , however much is down to build quality , this will show over an extended period

The capacity in Ah will often be similar, but watch the cold cranking amps (CCA) figure.

A quality battery may have a value for this that is double what an unknown-brand will have.

Chris

That's rather a sweeping statement. I removed the battery in my BMW to charge it and on replacement the only thing 'lost' was the radio stations memory.

Not really, the average person does not know how to recode and retune their radio, let alone such vagaries as losing the idle till the ecu relearns, having windows that no longer do as you expect, a clock that needs resetting, finding that the gearbox has re-set to default settings and a hundred and one other things.

Keeping the system powered up on a modern car IS a very wise precaution, particularly since the OP does not sound very skilled (no offence intended)

I am pleased that changing the battery on your BMW went ok, but as a mechanic I see many instances where it has not gone well. And think of the time you would have saved by keeping the power on !!

Mrcheerful

If they don't know how to tune the radio, how do they get the stations they want in the first place? And not all radios have codes - mine doesn't.

All those default settings should be ok - and the idea of learning ECUs taking ages to work again properly is a myth. If the car has dealer programmable settings that are lost again that's unusual.

Then don't leave the car when you go on holiday - plenty end up with a

*totally* flat battery afterwards.

Be good to know which cars these are so we know to avoid them. As one who deals with electronics, it is very poor practice to only rely on a device known to be likely to be let go flat or fail for the backup of essential information. And of course few makers do - otherwise things like electronic mileage recorders would re-set to zero each time power was removed.

I don't know about you, but it doesn't take me very much time to re-code a radio.

Further, the (often unnecessary) first step demanded by the HBOL for a surprising variety of tasks is to remove the battery. It doesn't do any damage. Any car which has problems with the power being interrupted is rather badly designed.

mrcheerful seems to have convinced himself the job is rather harder than it actually is.

That will work fine on all modern cars too. The only problem is any effect the loss of power will have on the cars electronics. Basically it may all reset to defaults, and have to be reset.

I would be quite unsurprised if the people who knew what they were doing didn't bother hooking it up to a third power source either.

i know my focus is a right peta if the battery is disconnected for any lenght of time , takes about 8 miles to relearn everything , after that everything is ok

[...]

I'm surprised to hear that; my Focus just runs with the idle slightly raised for the first couple of minutes after a battery reconnect. Other than that it's perfectly normal.

Chris