I posted a thread a couple days ago about my car that I thought had a bad alternater. I replaced the battery that I bought in July(2 year free repl). I got the new battery today(EverStart), and put it in the car. I started the car and turned on the headlights, A/C and the radio. I drove it for 30 miles because I was told that the battery was bad and the battery did not loose any power. I have a new question now though. The tranny slips a little when in gear and when it does the engine revs until i let off the gas and while it revs the volts gauge goes all the way to 18 and the dash lights come on and static comes throgh the radio. Is this a sign that the alternater is bad and over-charging? Also when I step on the brake pedal, the radio goes out for a second or two and comes back on. What could be causing this? One more question. I put the drivers door window down and can not get it to go back up, is there a trick to get it to go up until I can replace the electric motor? I know this is long and I have alot of questions, but I really will appreciate and tips and suugestions.
your voltage is not supposed to go over about 14.5 volts so your regulator is bad, the regulator is probably in the alternator. The only other reason it would go to 18 volts is the wire that feeds the alternator a sample of outside voltage is bad. Try grabbing the window with pliers and pull up while operationg the button.
A couple of years ago I was working on my son's 87 Maxima that had similar electrical problems. It all started with intermittent problems with headlights going out and it turned out to be a bad fuse box. I had to replace most of the little clips that held in the fuses because they were cracked and brittle and didn't hold the fuse securely. At any rate, after doing this I still had weird stuff happening...
Radio would die if I pushed in the lighter, then come back on if I opened the drivers side door. Sometimes I could put the drivers side window down, sometimes not. Sometimes it would only go partially down and not go back up, and sometimes it would go down at random! You get the idea. I was totally lost after looking for what seemed to me was most likely an electrical grounding issue.
Like yours, the battery was replaced in this car shortly before all this started. The terminals were cleaned up so as to get a good connection when the battery was installed. After running out of alternatives I decided that there was one thing I hadn't checked and was actually a little reluctant to do. The connector on the battery cable has several wires going into it, 3 or 4 if I remember correctly and is a little expensive to replace. (It's been awhile and I'm going from memory so I'm sorry I can't be more precise.) Anyway, these wires go into a housing that isn't accessible so it's impossible to see the actual connection inside. I decided to get medieval on this thing and took a hammer to it to bust the plastic housing. The contacts were totally covered with familiar green crap from oxidation, battery acid, whatever. After separating the wires inside and hooking one at a time, I could isolate the problems I described earlier. So, I cut all of the wires except for the main cable and put on new connectors. Cleaned everything up and viola! Electrical problems gone!
I'm not suggesting you go out and smash the hell out of your battery cable connector, just check it out for signs of corrosion inside. You may even be able take the ground wires off without smashing anything and see how / if it effects any issues you are experiencing. Now that I think of it, I believe that's what I did. Took off the wires and determined (by trial and error mostly)that my problems were likely caused by a bad battery terminal connector.
I'm sure you can tell by this post that I'm no mechanic, this is just my experience with a similar problem. Hope this helps!
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