June 2, 2011. Paul Hixon
Has your cars battery died? If so it might be that it’s well past its best before date and your best course really is to purchase a new one, or it could well be that you simply drained its charge and haven’t noticed. This article is going to help you determine which of these categories your cars battery falls into, of course there could be other things which could be causing the problem, e.g.
corrosion, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just focus on the problem of undercharged batteries for now.
When someone wants to save money on a product they shop around for the cheapest price, unfortunately this doesn’t always work with car batteries because identical batteries don’t vary hugely in price, you’re far better off trying your hardest to make your existing battery last as long as possible. New car batteries will cost you between $40 and $120 on average, there’s no telling how much you’ll actually have to until you head down to the autozone.com and use their battery finder to figure out what battery your car actually needs.
A normal car battery will last you between 3 and 5 years, if yours is significantly younger than this you may want to pry a little further into why your cars battery has just failed. One of the reasons could be that it’s simply run out of charge, the way to determine whether this is actually the case is to drop 2 tablets of aspirin into the battery and then see what happens. If the battery is otherwise fully functioning the acid contained in the aspirin will combine with the sulphuric acid in the battery to produce a slight charge. Try turning on your cars engine after trying this, if it starts up fairly quickly then you know that your cars battery just needed more juice, try driving around for 30 minutes to get the alternator to kick, this should recharge it plenty,
Needs help installing garage floor mats? Check out this article to find out all you need to know.
Updated June 2, 2011. Published February 10, 2011. Paul Hixon
