Dodge Battery Service at Johnny's Automotive

Heat is harder on a battery than cold is. Cold weather gets the blame because that is when a weak battery finally refuses to start the car, but the damage usually happened months earlier, in July. Under the hood in Central Florida a battery spends most of the year at temperatures that speed up the chemistry inside it, evaporate fluid out of the cells, and build sulfate on the plates. Sulfate is the chalky layer that keeps a battery from accepting and holding a full charge. So a battery down here can look fine on a mild morning and still be well past its useful life.

Testing tells us more than age does. We load test the battery and watch what the voltage actually does under demand, check state of charge, and see how it behaves with the engine running and after the car has been sitting. Then we pull the terminals, clean the posts and clamps, and look at the white or green crust that quietly adds resistance to every circuit the battery feeds. A loose or corroded connection can act exactly like a dead battery, and it costs nothing to rule out.

Here is the part that saves people money. A battery that keeps dying is often not the problem. If the charging system is not putting voltage back in, a brand new battery will die the same way in a few weeks. If something in the car is drawing current after you shut it off, same result. So before we sell you a battery, we check charging output and look for a drain. Sometimes the answer really is a battery. Sometimes it is a charging or wiring issue, and a new battery would only have reset the clock on the same complaint. Either way you get the test numbers and the inspection photos on your phone, so you can see what we saw.