mwilly00

Ok so my problem is that I disconnected the battery to clear a CEL, I'll describe why I had that in a second, and now my car won't start. I turn the key and the dash lights came on at first but dimmed and now don't light at all. When I push the start button nothing happens, no clicking nothing. The lights don't turn on either. However we did push start it and I was able to drive it home no problem. I let it run for about 20min or so. So there should have been some built up charge but I tried to start it right after I shut it off and nothing again, not even dash lights.

What I've tried.
-Reseting the ECU again
-Checked the fuses UTH and Inside that I felt would pertain to this
-The battery seems to have power. The lights on my voltage stabalizer are blinking indicating good power.

The reason I had a CEL is I was doing some exhaust work and had the O2 sensor out. Well about that point I noticed that it wasn't on the lift right so we brought it down and I had to start it and move it. So running car with no O2 senso = CEL.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. I really hope I didn't fry my ECU. Oh and the battery is less than a year old.

Matt

xviper

First, put a voltmeter on your battery terminals and see what it says. A good battery should read at least 12.5V resting. If the battery is good, I'm going to guess that your voltage stabilizer kit is a piece of crap and is interfering with the power deliver from your battery.

mwilly00

OK, I'll go ahead and check the voltage.

As far as the voltage stabalizer I've had that on my car almost as long as the battery, and I've reset the ecu since then and never had a problem. But I'll disconnect that next if the volts are good and see what happens.

Thanks xviper.

Ek9

I think Vipers point is in general, they're crap. Useless weight, like a hypergrounding system. Since the battery was good before you disconnected and it's not working now after, I doubt it's the battery. It's far more likely that somethings wrong with how you hooked it up so, it's not charging.

Get the engine running and then read the volts at the battery. If should be 14 or so. That being said, if it's the original battery it's on borrowed time anyway. I'd replace it as a first trouble-shooting step.

mwilly00

Ok so I just tested the battery at Advance and it came back dead. It was <1.0v. Its an optima yellow top thats about 10 months old. So I'm going to take it to sears and try and get my money back. Its still under warranty.

xviper

You have one of the many typical bum Optimas. An Optima distributor posted here saying that he was almost embarrassed to sell those things. Optima admitted to having some problems for a while. Maybe your next one will be a better product?

mwilly00

Yeah, unfortunately I didn't find that out until after I bought it. I just got back from sears though and they gave me a full refund. Now I just need to decide which battery I'm going to get.

Thanks for the advice.

xviper

Why didn't you just get a Sears DieHard while you were there? You don't some "magical" battery like some people think Optimas are. You just need a good, brand name battery.

mwilly00

I wanted to get a light weight battery when I bought the optima 10 mo ago but I needed it quick because my car died like this time. Well now I'm going to get what I want and suck up some down time. I read many of the posts on batteries so I got to read your opinion on batteries, but I decied to go with an Odyssey PC680T. It was about half the price of the optima I just returned so I used some of the left overs to have it shipped 2 day air.

You used to run a light weight Hawker right? What did you think about it?

xviper

Yes, I did. It was a perfectly good battery and I never had any problems with it till fall came and the temps started to dip. It would begin to crank more and more slowly as the cold approached. I got worried and decided to just put in a "regular" battery. If I lived in a place that never got cold winters, I would probably still have the Hawker. Also, if you have heavy duty stereo equipment, a Hawker type of battery won't cut it.