Defective battery? Dead car.

[thesober]

I go to my car this evening and my key fob doesn't, I manually open the door and try to start the car...dead, no lights, nada. Car is totally dead.

Last time I used the car was Sunday, so approx 4-5 days since running the car, and this is normal for me as I mostly use the car on the weekends. I boost the car and it starts, drive for approx 1.5 hours after that and everything is as normal. Double checked if I accidently left any lights on, and everything looks fine....does this sound like a defective battery? The battery was new 1.5 years ago. Any ideas? Car is totally stock.

[Zoom Zoom Boy]

I'd guess a door wasn't closed fully and left the interior light on which drained the battery. To be sure, go take it for a battery capacity and charge test.

[Flagrum_3]

Your style of driving, i.e only on weekends does not help in the situation and if the battery 'sits' for days in cooler or cold temps it will obviously drain.Driving only for short periods on the weekend will not be enough to charge the battery to a 'true' full charge, hense leaving it sitting again, another 3-4 days will drain the battery and eventually kill it completely.

I'd suggest you purchase a trickle charger, if it's possible to plug her in somewhere.Or plan your weekend drives so you keep the engine running longer with very few stops where you'd have to restart the vehicle.Or purchase a Optima Yellow top battery;not a fix-all but is designed to better meet your needs with less draining over timeand able to acheive full charge more rapidly.
_3

[Harbour Rat]

I also suspect your battery is bad. The fact the car runs for more than a couple minutes after being boosted tells me the alternator is working; with a dead battery it would conk out fast when the booster cables were disconnected if the alternator wasn't working. It is possible there is some electrical drain somewhere but in these cases it is a bad battery 90+% of the time.

There is something wrong, that is for sure and I don't think sitting for a few days every week is the problem. My Mazda3 has spent the last 15 months sitting regularly for 5-10 days at a time, a couple of times for a month and it starts with no problem. For several years Mother's Civic has been used almost exclusively for weekly grocery runs (maybe 10 minutes each way) and it starts fine. After 6 or 7 years the battery was getting a bit soft and it turned over kind of slow if the temperature got down to -25 or so but it still started. The "new" battery is 3 (or is it 4?) years old now and the car still starts fine, on average once every 5-6 days, year round.

[Flagrum_3]

I also suspect your battery is bad. The fact the car runs for more than a couple minutes after being boosted tells me the alternator is working; with a dead battery it would conk out fast when the booster cables were disconnected if the alternator wasn't working. It is possible there is some electrical drain somewhere but in these cases it is a bad battery 90+% of the time.

There is something wrong, that is for sure and I don't think sitting for a few days every week is the problem. My Mazda3 has spent the last 15 months sitting regularly for 5-10 days at a time, a couple of times for a month and it starts with no problem. For several years Mother's Civic has been used almost exclusively for weekly grocery runs (maybe 10 minutes each way) and it starts fine. After 6 or 7 years the battery was getting a bit soft and it turned over kind of slow if the temperature got down to -25 or so but it still started. The "new" battery is 3 (or is it 4?) years old now and the car still starts fine, on average once every 5-6 days, year round.

Of course it's the battery, but I don't agree with your hypothesis that the OPs style is not the culprit, as he stated the battery is fairly new.Maybe your mother has a miracle battery because over my years I've seen alot of batteries die well before their time just for the reasons I claimed earlier.If you understand how a battery works, it's common sense.Could be other things as well too numerous to mention, but considering their style of use they will continue to have problems.

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[thesober]

Thanks for the suggestions, I replaced the battery as a primary cheap fix, gotta love costco warranty.
I'll keep an eye on it for a while, and double check the door lights and other possible electrical leaks. I've been driving the car ocassionally for the life of the car (probably 12-15k per year), never had a problem with the OEM battery, or the kirkland battery till last friday.

[thesober]

I wanted to update this thread for future reference, I think I found what was causing my electrical drain. I had a faulty hood latch pin that was causing my alarm to go off periodically, so I unplugged it as an easy fix. By unplugging it, the system wouldn't go into sleep mode and therefore would drain at a higher than normal level until it was dead.

I checked this with a multimeter with the car off, the car should go into sleep mode after 30minutes or so, my car didnt and was using around 10x more battery than sleep mode. When I plugged the pin wire back in, after 30min, it dropped back to normal.

I replaced the hood latch pin wire yesterday, so i'm hoping it fixes my stock alarm issue too.