Buying Time

 

Just when you think you have things figured out. 

You may recall that before Christmas last year, my daughter had her third dead battery in a little over two years since she has been using that vehicle for commuting to college. The last time it happened, I bought a battery from a local store and made the 90 mile drive up there to replace it. After I got it going, I drove it to the local dealership to have them do an "thorough" battery test on it only to find out $300 later that their thorough test was to hook a multimeter up to it while running, nearly identical to the one I had used earlier to do the same thing. 

She made it home for the semester and then left again for the spring semester without issue. She parked her car for a month out in the parking lot and went to use it only to find out it was completely dead again. At this point, I'm confident that there is some draw being put on it that is enough to use up the battery in a few weeks time. I am not confident that I have the skills to figure WHAT is doing the energy using when the car is off but I'm going to have to learn since I no longer think I can rely on others to figure it out either.

However, I had a more pressing issue. My daughter needed to use the car, the battery was dead and I was 90 miles away. I quickly processed the options at hand:

A. Buy another battery, drive 90 miles there to replace it again and then haul the failed battery 90 miles back home again to try and claim some sort of warranty though there would be no guarantee that I could collect.

B. Call AAA, for which my daughter has a membership thanks to my planning ahead, and let them sort it out.

I obviously went with the B option, but soon got a call from them stating that the battery's health was only at 13%. They recommended replacing it which would cost me another $200+ dollars. I reluctantly agreed. Had I been thinking about more than the sorry state of my wallet, I might have asked them to put the failed battery in the back of the vehicle so I could pick it up the next convenient time and still try to get a warranty refund out of it but I didn't think of that until it was too late. What did cross my mind was that spring break (at the time of this event) was still a month away and seeing that a month was all it took to deplete the previous battery down, I still needed to come up with a solution.

So on a very frigid day when the temps were only around the low teens and with 40 mph winds so it felt like it was way below zero, I set out with the above device with the red circular knob connected to the right (negative) battery terminal called a shutoff switch. When the knob is as shown above, the battery is essentially completely disconnected from the vehicle. To start the vehicle now, one has to use the manual key out of the fob to open the door and pop the hood so that the knob can be turned and the car then started. A pain, but no more than she drives the thing, it should be much more convenient than coming out to a dead battery and spending a couple hours and $200+ to start it every time.

I got the switch installed in about five minutes and by then, I was extremely chilled despite wearing heavy wool lined gloves and my heavy weight Carhartt jacket. After showing my daughter how to operate it, then taking her out to eat and using our credit card to stock up on snack foods for her dorm room, we drove the 90 miles back home.

I'm not sure I'll be able to spend time over upcoming spring break to work on her car but hopefully this buys me time until summer. Hopefully by then, YouTube and Google will teach me how to solve this problem once and for all.

[A real time update: my daughter was able to turn the knob and start her car to use it yesterday to do some shopping for dorm supplies after sitting unstarted in the parking lot for three weeks.]