Batteries

I have lived in south and north for a while but most of my life in midwest. He the 90?s is not rare and though not this year we have seen over 100 a few times. I travel to SC in summer sometimes and it is "toasty" there is summer. Talk about dead batteries, one year around xmas in the 90?s I was crossing South Dakota in during severe cold and near blizzard conditions (25 to 30 below with 50 mph winds) and spent the two day in rapid city because I did not want fight the weather anymore and it was getting colder still even though my burb with dual heaters handled it fine, I had very young children and did not want to chance it if we had trouble. ANYHOW, the reason I started this story is while we killed time in Rapid at a big indoor mall (popular in cold climates) every place that sold car battieries that day had old batteries stacked in big piles and I overheard a guy in Sears tell someone looking for a battery that there was no batteries to be found anywhere that day in or around Rapid City for 50 miles or so. Never seen such a run on batteries. Liek me tell you minus 30 with 50MPH plus winds is COLD! I wonder how many of those batteries were really bad and not just fully charged.

Reply to
SnoMan
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As batteries age and as the temperature drops, batteries lose a portion of their available power. A combination of the two can make a battery that is good enough to start an engine in cool weather fail in cold conditions.

The other problem that most people are not aware of is that if you are using a lot of power to operate headlights, fog lights, seat heaters, rear window defogger, heater fan, etc. and spend a lot of time at low RPM because of poor road conditions, the battery will gradually become discharged. Add a cold snap and there might not be enough reserve to start.

Reply to
Ray O

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