How long would you expect a starter battery to last?

[Big Sandy]

Went to start the van this morning, and zip, zilch, nada. Well, a click and a groan, then nothing.

It was fine until I ran it flat by forgetting to turn the sidelights off. Recharged it, and it was showing 12.6v after attempting to start it...so not dead as such. But I guess it's got a weak cell under load. Chuffing big battery too..(a 110)

Thing is, it's only 5 years old. I expect things to.last longer than that! The new one (getting delivered to the garage on Monday, on account) is about £120. Has a 4 year warranty.

An expense I could have lived without, for sure.

 

[Public Enemy]

Three to five years seems to be about average, although sometimes considerably longer. We recently replaced alternator and battery, not cheap.
Merry Christmas.

 

[Big Sandy]

Merry Christmas

Aye, just that. This will be the second battery I've put on it.

I ran the Landy for nearly 10 years on the same battery, the most recent one is 7 years old. Doesn't seem to matter how much you pay either, the shortest lived one I had was a Bosch one! Though I hear Yuasa battery's are getting a bad rep.

 

[Don the Don]

A drop tester is the best way to check a battery like that [and no I don't mean launching it off a cliff] the drop tester across both terminals and the reading should hold up for a period of time, if you hear a fizzing sound that indicates a dead cell gassing, the local garage/tyre place should be able to test them, I always fitted a tractor battery to my Landrover from a farm shop good quality and cheap

 

[Big Sandy]

A drop tester

I know exactly the tool you mean, though I have to admit I haven't seen one for years.

Reminds me of something that happened years ago....Land Ranger Services in Middlewich.

I was at the parts desk, can't remember what I was after now, probably lots of expensive stuffs. Anyway, talking to the owner, phone rings, he says "excuse me" and answers the phone.

"Yes, oh right...starting issues? Won't turn over? Maybe your battery is dead. You need to get a drop test on it, then you'll know. Ok, later..."

Back to the blether. I'm sorting out the rest of the bits I'm after, getting ready to pay. Phone goes again.

"Hello?" A moment while he's listening. His face is going red, and he's struggling to keep it together. "Well, yes. If that's the case you'll be needing a new one then. Yes, got plenty in stock...see ya"...phone down.

At which point he starts laughing, fit to burst. Tears of laughter.

Turns out the guy has told him that he had done a drop test on the battery, and it cracked when it hit the floor, so can he buy a new one now.....?

 

[Big Sandy]

Oh, yeah, the Landy battery was from the agri engineers. The van one was from the local parts place. (I say local...not local to me!)

Got the new one coming from Highland Motor Parts (HMP. Is that a sign?) to delivered to the garage on Monday. Works out cheaper even with the markup. And it will arrive the right way up! Last time I ordered a battery it came from Tayna, and the courier left it in the porch upside down. Fortunately AGM, but still...

 

[DD67]

A drop tester is the best way to check a battery like that [and no I don't mean launching it off a cliff] the drop tester across both terminals and the reading should hold up for a period of time, if you hear a fizzing sound that indicates a dead cell gassing, the local garage/tyre place should be able to test them, I always fitted a tractor battery to my Landrover from a farm shop good quality and cheap

View attachment 33357

These days most places use a bit of kit that resembles a PDQ bank card reader. It interrogates all aspects of the batteries health. Then it prints off the details.
I used the printout from my local auto factors to claim a new battery from Halfords under the 5yr warranty they offer on their own batteries.
The battery was on an MX-5 years ago. I hadn't purchased the battery so consequently I didn't have the receipt.
However, I successfully managed to argue that the 5yr warranty shouldn't be affected by changes of ownership.
i.e. the item itself either has a 5yr warranty, or it doesn't?
After a fair bit of a disagreement, they eventually honoured the warranty!

 

[Big Sandy]

Scania offer a 5 year warranty on Thier batteries... Thing is, fit it to your truck yourself, consider the warranty invalid!

 

[Don the Don]

These days most places use a bit of kit that resembles a PDQ bank card reader. It interrogates all aspects of the batteries health. Then it prints off the details.

"wow" ain't technology cool, trouble is I'm a dinosaur and don't need anything so advanced to tell me if something is fooked and can be picked up cheap.

 

[Big Sandy]

"wow" ain't technology cool, trouble is I'm a dinosaur and don't need anything so advanced to tell me if something is fooked and can be picked up cheap.

Frequently I do wonder if we are related.

Then I think, naaah. Don had a lucky escape there!

 

[Don the Don]

Frequently I do wonder if we are related.

"I hear you brother" But you are the lucky one, my lot would make an award winning TV series or horror show, Dallas would have had nothing on my lot, I am still finding out truth's and skeletons in the cupboard's to this day.

 

[MartytheMartian]

Skeleton's in the cupboard? I got 'em in spades. My Dad was adopted at birth and a couple of years ago I did a DNA test and started looking into my family ancestry. Now I was told that my Dad's father was a Canadian pilot who met his mother during WWII and he was born while her husband was away in the army and my mother was convinced her great, great grandfather on her mothers' side was a landed farmer and provost in Cupar Angus and that her great uncle was Law Lord of Scotland at the start of the 1900's and owners of shops in her fathers side who had lost it all in the depression. Well the truth I found out was that my mothers mothers, family were of the same name as the Cupar Angus family but were actually a line of indentured farm servants, a Blacksmith and a carpenter amongst other humble professions (Nothing disreputable there) and, on her father's side they were Ulster Scots settlers who came over from Ireland not long before the potato famine and her great great grandfather was a rag merchant and her ancestors inbetween included a haberdasher with the Co-op and a maker of wooden packing crates.

Now, on my fathers side after much digging and led by the DNA results it turns out I am related to most of the people on the island of Islay (Certainly every one on that island named MacNeill) and the connection is that his grandmother was kicked off the island by her family after she fell pregnant with her second illegitimate child and she gave birth to her daughter, my grandmother at the poor house in Glasgow (Now the site of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Govan) and, then she apparently became the owner/madam of a well known and popular brothel in Glasgow and her daughter my gran, while she apparently didn't work in the family trade took after her old Mum in screwing around and my father is the result of a dalliance with a travelling salesman from London (a Scallywag who had done time for fraud from his employer and serial bigamist) while her husband was away with the army. So much for all the shit they show on TV of how everyone is related to Royalty, some civil rights hero or other famous person.

On the battery front my last new battery was killed in a matter of months and a couple of days of subzero temperatures in the shed while another battery which was an unknown age but at least a couple of years older was fine. I haven't checked my bikes out in the shed recently but I'm guessing they will all need new batteries in the new year.

Given that over the years I've had more problems with batteries, alternators and rectifiers than I have with mechanics I find myself wondering just how much of a problem increased dependence on electrical gubbins with all this eco shit will cause.

 

[DD67]

My skeletons are slightly more amusing...

My Dad, or more accurately my sperm donor. Because he did a runner when he discovered that he'd got my Mum up the duff.
Wasn't short of a few quid as he owned several Spar shops.
However, getting him to pay maintenance was like trying to push custard up hill with one chopstick!
My Mum had to constantly take him to court. Even then he'd always wriggle out of paying in full!

He failed to comply with one particular court order & a warrant was issued for his arrest. He then came before a female judge/magistrate for the first time. She read through the notes about his constant failure to cough up.
And although he was stood there with chequebook in hand & offering to settle in full.
It was the Friday before a bank holiday. So she accepted his cheque but locked him up until the following Wednesday. To ensure that the cheque didn't bounce!

I only discovered that after he died in 2022. We also discovered that he was 12yrs older than he'd claimed to be!

Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish!

 

[Big Sandy]

Think I told y'all about my mother. She used to go to work and lock me in the under stairs cupboard, very handy with her fists, and once smacked me over the head with a fire iron. The scar on my head is about 3" long.

She didn't suffer fools gladly, which was ironic as she died before noon on April fools day. She was once arrested for assaulting a Swedish sailor, as a wpc. She twatted him with her lamp after he apparently made a suggestive request, another split head.... She was 5'2" and he was 6'6". She got off. Her and Dad met in the police.

Dad was ex Seaforth Highlanders, one of 7 children, 5 boys, 2 girls, left the army as a sergeant and joined the police in Cheshire, so I got born down there. His Dad was a miner, but joined the grenadier guards in WW1, and went into the police too upon leaving. I know very little about him. Or my grandmother, though apparently she was a right martinet. I do remember dad saying he bought a new coat, put it over the back of a chair, and went to tell his mother, so she could have a look. When he came back his coat was gone, and his dad was stood there. "Have you seen my new coat?" Upon which his dad took him to the range, opened the fire box door and there it was burning. "You have a coat peg. That will teach you to use it."

Mother's dad was in the engineers, a master farrier. Caught malaria in Gallipoli, and again in 1922, the second bout killed him. His father was a master stone mason.

Bit of a thread swap from batteries, but hey....

Here's grandad on mother's side (don't have any of dad's dad)



And before shipping out to Gallipoli



And one of Dad somewhere in Germany, (centre)



And preparing to cross a river in clogland somewhere, near Nijmegen.


Third on the right (the left handed one)

And, I swear the second on the left is Norman Wisdom!

Dad took a shell fragment in Germany somewhere...enough to put him in hospital. When he went upstairs, his leg used to click! I remember we were in the 2a driving to town, and he started cursing, scratching his leg, and then he had blood on his fingers, and he threw something out of the window...me being all worried, I ask what's going on, "bastard German shrapnel!". I said he'd carried it around for 30 years, he should maybe have kept it!

I do have a brother, but I haven't seen that shiftless bastard for 28 years. Could be dead for all I know.

Oh, yeah...my new battery never turned up. Garage is chasing it.

 

[MartytheMartian]

To add about my bigamist Grandad, we only discovered who he was a couple of weeks ago when, through Ancestry DNA, my Dad discovered at 82 years old that he has a younger half brother down south. in Bristol, and got in touch with him. Now the tale my Dad was told was that when his half brothers mother fell pregnant with him, her husband, my Grandad, said he had to go away as he 'couldn't be around pregnant women' and he never came back but, at a later date, two women turned up at his wife's door who were also married to him. A right charmer.

 

[DD67]

It's all very interesting gents.
But how the f#ck did we get from Sandy's knackered battery, to our ancestral skeletons?

 

[Public Enemy]

My grandad was done for assault and battery. Does that help?

 

[MartytheMartian]

Let's face it the subject of batteries can often be a bit flat and you need to charge things up a little.

 

[gazzatriumph]

I've just sent off DNA to Ancestry.
I've only just started looking at family tree. One thing I found and didn't know, was that in early 1900s girls could marry aged 12 and boys aged 14, my nans mum married at 14 to a 15 year old. A bit of a shock.
My batteries are fine.

 

[MartytheMartian]

The DNA thing is quite interesting and gives you a certainty that basic research doesn't. When it came to my fathers side of the family I drew a blank at his birth certificate which told me his mothers name and her husbands name. I searched for his mother's birth and that gave me her mother's name and that she came form Islay but, as much of the island are related to each other and there are only a few names, including the prominent name of MacNeill that are very common it took the DNA and establishing the strongest relationship to identify which branch of the family we hung off and then, a few weeks ago my Dad's half brother showed up in DNA matches as his family had just done an Ancestry DNA kit.

On my mothers side there was an existing family history from maybe seventy years ago done by a distant relative in the states and he had jumped to the conclusion that, as some of my mothers family had the surname Anderson and were in Coupar Angus in the late eighteen/early nineteen hundreds that we must be members of that family and so related to Lord Andrew MacBeth Anderson but it turns out that our Andersons were passing through and my ancestor was actually a Blacksmith from Cromdale and from a lineage that goes back to before the 1600's around the Nairn, Dallas and Cromdale area although there was a female Anderson who married into the family who came from Coupar Angus and she may genuinely provide a link to the Andersons of Coupar Angus who are otherwise entirely unrelated. The DNA also revealed that ninety eight percent of my DNA is related to the oldest peoples living in Britain right back to the first settlers after the Ice started to recede with one and a half percent of my DNA being north European (Scandinavian, German, French) and a final one half percent that can be traced back to Eastern Europe. It's a lie that Britain is a 'mongrel nation' and we are largely the same people that have been indigenous to this land since the end of the ice age but of course, if they made it clear that Angles, Saxons, Normans, Romans and Vikings actually play very little part in the DNA of white British people it would destroy the narrative they often used to try and claim that the recent immigrants are just the latest in a long line to mix us up. We are probably some of the most pure bred and strongest blood lines in Europe.