I inspect my batteries every month. The first sign of corrosion means the battery is junk. Sure it still has life in it but ti's leaking and then you have problems like this. Sure it's hard to replace a battery that looks ok and only a little corrosion on the terminal but a battery should never leak. I had to replace one of my batteries because the hold down was corroded No apparent leak could be seen and it was odd that it would corrode there. Had battery replaced along with new hold down and no more corrosion.

 

As an aside to this, if you run a battery tender and only hook it to 1 battery, it will do the same thing as noted above. The battery the tender is hooked to will off gas and the hold down plate will corrode. You have to make a pigtail to allow the tender to connect to both batteries to prevent this from happening.

 

What? The batteries ARE connected - directly - by a 0 gage heavy duty cable. You think adding a 14 gage pigtail is going to make any electrical difference? none at all. Because our batteries are permanently wired in parallel by heavy gage wire, you can treat them electrically as one single battery.

 

All I can tell you is that when I had the pigtail connected to only 1 battery in both my 7.3 and my 6.7, the battery it was connected to off gassed enough to cause corrosion, with the 6.7 doing more than the 7.3. Once I spilt the tender pigtail to go to both batteries, I haven't had any more issues with corrosion and I have not yet changed out batteries. So I can only figure out that charging the "far" battery through the "close" battery caused the "close" battery to become charged first and then off gas while charging through to the "far" battery. YMMV. This is only what I've seen.

 

You are correct, RV owners have known this for years. Likewise the close battery will discharge faster than the other one. That very small resistance in even heavy cables is the problem. A battery charger should go to the negative of one battery and the positive of the other.

 

Talked to my service advisor today.
Batteries are not covered by ESP extended warranty.

Since the battery is what caused the clamp and cable failure, it is also not covered. ($#&@#)! I would be on the hook for the cables, installed, for around 500 clams.

Looks like I am going to the battery store and repairing the cable myself. I think motorcraft batteries are junk, and will spend that $500 on a pair of optima's instead.

 

I am surprised the Ford ESP didn't cover this. We had the same issue in my wife's Explorer. The dealer covered the positive batter cable replacement but not the batteries. They did allow me to replace the battery myself after they did the cable.

 

I didn't have good luck with the OE Motorcraft's either. Those leaked everywhere on top but failed before any significant damage to the brackets or cables. My second set were DieHard Platinum AGM group 65's that made it 47 months and went with Interstate MTP-65's for this third set.

 

My original Motorcraft batteries are seven years, eight months old with no corrosion or signs of failure yet.

 

I had a battery corrode on my F150 and my dealer replaced the battery at no charge to me. It was about 4 years old at the time.
But I have taken quite a few vehicles there. That might have something to do with it.

 

Well my truck has the ESP and they still say not covered
when I pulled the battery out, you could see acid bubbling up from a small pin hole next to the positive terminal.

By this time, I just needed the truck on the road, so 2 new batteries and 2 gauge copper butt splice and all is good.

 

This is the reason i don't buy a ESP. If I bought a used car than i would buy one but they don't cover much. It looks good on paper but for the most part the things they cover just dontr brake. With a used car you never know how the previous owner treated this car.

 

My 2015 ate the cable as well, I find it odd it's always the drivers side battery. I was able to salvage the end and went with agm batteries.

 

+1 for the Anti Corrosion battery Terminal Spray. Here is A Shot of my Stock 2016 Batteries. You can see some moisture near the Vents but no Corrosion.