It seems like less than a year ago when we had the twice in one day dying Excursion leaving us for dead on the side of the road. I just spent a half hour looking, but I must have given it a weird name as none of the blogs seemed to be about getting stranded around a year ago. It almost doesn't surprise me that it would develop problems. It has sat for two weeks where it didn't get used at all with one week where I used it for four days to go to work. It was only driven 4 days in July. I'm supposed to get to normal this week, Wife had even left to San Antonio for a conference and I was simply starting the week by going to fill up the gas tank and get him a burger for dinner. When we got to the end of the street, the battery light came on and I decided to turn right back home and take a look at what was going on. Boy had already left for the night, he was off to spend the night at his GF house but I called him to come and help me.
I popped the hood and saw the terminals were dirty and corroded like Boy's last week. I hoped that cleaning the terminals would solve my problems but no. I used a voltmeter and got a reading of 12.3volts before I cleaned them. After I turned on the engine, I got a reading of 12.1volts which was lower. At this point I started sensing it was the alternator and not the battery. I looked online and found a "negative terminal test" which is simply while the engine is on, disconnect the negative terminal. If the car turns off, it has a bad alternator, if it stays on, it is a bad battery. I disconnected the battery and the engine promptly died. Now I was sure of the problem.
Since we have had problems like this is the past, we have a pretty good battery charger, so I connected the battery posts to it and waited for it to get 100% charged. After doing this, I had Boy follow me to Ford so I could drop it off and hopefully get it serviced tomorrow. I am hoping the alternator still has some sort of warranty, but with my luck, it will just have expired. It does suck that the first one lasted over 14 years and the second one can't make it past a year.
Before driving it like we did without an alternator, I read online a bunch of suggestions and most seemed to say that with a fully charged battery I could expect the car to run between 30 minutes and a couple hours, just don't run the A/C, or radio. I would have run without lights too, but it was around midnight that we were dropping off the vehicle. The drive was non eventful, thankfully.
After dropping off the Excursion and filling out the paperwork, I told Boy to swing by Whataburger as Javalina was still hungry. I offered Boy and his GF a burger and handed them my credit card but GF gave Boy her card and handed mine back to me. She said I was always buying them food, so it was her turn. I thanked her and we were taken home. If all goes well, my Excursion will be ready before I head to work tomorrow, and if not, Boy and I will be sharing his vehicle for a couple days. We'll see.
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