Hey community,

My situation:
So for the last, I want to say 6 months, my battery has been giving me hard starts. I noticed this would happen during short trips (maybe recharging problem) and a maybe once or twice from a cold engine. However, when this would happen I would just need to be wait 10 secs - 1 min and the car would start up after it gave me a hard start.

The battery finally died while I was out about a week ago. I took it back to firestone with my warranty and they said it was definitely a dead battery and said they will recharge it. If it recharged they will give me back the battery. The battery ended up recharging and he gave it back to me, he said he was surprised that it passed but it did. Put the battery in and on I went. 2 days later it died again, I took it back and told them it must be a bad battery and I just wanted to get a new one under warranty. He gave me a new one and I put it in and the car started back up.

Now it's been 2 days since I got the new batttery. Everything is fine but it just gave me a hard start but it started back up after I waited like 10 secs. Now I'm scared it's going to die again before I go to work tomorrow because after the first time I had taken back the battery and got it recharged, the day after it gave me a hard start but it started and the day after it was dead.

anybody have any ideas what it can be. No after market parts or subs. I do have one of the USA spec satellite aux but I rarely even use that.

Thanks!

 

I'd pick up an OBD-II bluetooth scanner and use your phone to monitor your voltage as you drive. Could be that your alternator is on the way out and producing erratic voltage.

Are you sure your battery cables are making tight and clean contact with the terminals? It's also possible that the sheathing on one of your wires is worn off in some spot and it's arcing and shorting against the frame somewhere which is causing your voltage to drop when you crank the car. I think you definitely want to start first by checking your operating voltage as you drive the car and go from there.

 

Another thing to ponder is these are the exact same symptoms a camshaft position sensor will create when they first start to go bad. Heed the advice above and add the Torque Pro app to the equation. Depending on how much you pay for the scanner you're looking at around $20-25 total and will have a bad azz resource for your car that will surprise you at how much it can do.

 

Thanks partyman66 and Blue_dream for the reply.

Im going to take your guys advice and start off by getting a OB 2 blue tooth scanner and going from there. Thankfully the car started today so still hoping it was just the battery.

any recommendations where and what scanner to get? It seems like everyone gives good reviews about the torque app so something compatible with that would be nice. I have iOS by the way. Blue dream I read on your other post that you recommend the panlong but unfortunately there isn't any in stock in amazon.

 

If it were me looking again I'd do a search on a few automotive enthusiast websites to get their feedback on what they are happy with then head to Amazon (and maybe even cnet) and look through their choices by reading all the reviews I could. I'm **** like that with electronics............

 

OBDLink MX is basically the best in the business, but honestly there is no need to spend that kind of money for it if you plan on using it for occasional use. It's like $120 normally but i stumbled on one on Ebay that had been used once and was up for buy-it now of $50 which was about half of what they usually go for in very used condition, but this was was pretty much brand new and in the box. They make an LX version that's a little cheaper and still does everything we need. I think that stickers for around $75 normally. They always cut their prices temporarily around this time of year for the holidays. They just recently had a sale a few weeks ago where you could get a bunch off with coupons but that has since expired. Here is a link to the LX version which is all you need for our cars currently for $49:

https://www.scantool.net/obdlink-lxbt/

The advantage of these vs the Chinese $10 ones you can get on Amazon are:

1) OBDLink can be left in your car 100% of the time and it will auto-shutoff within a few minutes of shutting your car off rather than staying on and killing your battery over the course of a few days of not driving like the ELM327 Clone devices from Amazon do.
2) OBDLink has significantly faster response times for reading data from the OBD-II since they wrote their own firmware rather than using the pirated ELM327 firmware. This is useful when you are troubleshooting things like oxygen senors and you want to plot a curve of your O2 sensor values on a graph and responsiveness is essential.
3) It comes with a warranty and also has active and very responsive support from the US-based manufacturer
4) This one has a secure connection to the Bluetooth device whereas many others do not. This could possibly be a hacking hazard if someone intentionally tried to use it for malicious purposes, although I've yet to see any actual exploit target this since such a small % of vehicles on the road have these types of devices running in them on a daily basis.
5) This vendor actually has their own OBDLink Android app that is built directly for their specific device with certain optimizations that allow it to run a little better than generic OBD-Reader apps.

I'd still consider getting the Torque app if you get this because it has a lot of cool features that the OBDLink app itself doesn't have, although I personally have found the version of Torque that I'm using to be a little quirky and sometimes unreliable whereas the OBDLink app is very stable and works really well.

If you're not a huge car guy and just want to use it every once in a great while to pull and clear a code, go with one of the cheap Chinese ELM327 ones from Amazon/Ebay.

 

Check your ground connection. Check your battery voltage with the car off, off with a load on it (lights, radio, etc..), and running (it should be about 13-14v). Make sure your RPM needle jumps everytime you crank with no start. It could be your crank or cam sensors as well. I'd have the battery/starting system load tested as well. One of my problems on my Audi was the CCA of the battery caused hard starting conditions.