I'm having a battery/charging issue with my 86 F250 6.9. Originally, I thought I had a battery drain, so I figured I would mess with it tonight. I completely disconnected both batteries (removed positive terminals from each) and stuck the battery charger on the pos battery wire and grounded to chassis. The charger said "charge complete" which means it's sucking no juice. I opened the drivers door to turn on the dome light to simulate a drain... sure enough, it was sucking down 1/2 amp. I'm certain there is no drain now. So I am wondering why I keep coming out to dead batteries in the morning.

I've never had a truck with two batteries before so this is new territory to me... with that said, I think one of the two batteries are bad. Would that make sense? One battery is bad, therefore sucking juice out of the good battery? I decided to put two battery chargers on the truck tonight (one on each battery) and force a 2 amp charge into them until they wont take any more. I figure by morning we'll see which one is bad cause it'll still be sucking down 2 or more amps even by morn.

I'm fixin to buy two new batteries, any suggestions? I'd really like to replace the two with one bigger one for cost and simplicity reasons. I run a block heater in the winter, so cold starts are easy anyway.

Any suggestions? I just wanted to pick your guy's brain... kind of confirm what i'm thinking. Thanks forum.

 

are the batterys the same size

 

Identical batteries except the differences in posts. Champion 850cca's.

 

Have the batteries load tested.

-Enjoy
fh : )_~

 

I'd stick with dual bateries as you're gonna spend a pretty penny on one battery that can make the CCA the motor needs, and its probably not gonna fit without doing some modification

like festus said a quick load test on each battery will give you a good idea if one of them is not carying its weight, I'd pull the two of them and take them down to a shop/parts store in the back of the lil car so I didn't have to waste the shops time pulling unhooking them

 

also, if you have to replace one of the batteries, make sure you replace both at the same time. If not, the old battery will drain the new one and youll be coming out to dead batteries in the morning anyways.

 

X2 what boggs said. Also one or both your batts could have a dead cell or 2. A battery with a bad cell will show "surface charge" but once it gets a load on it, all the life is sucked out of it quick. Always replace in pairs, and it's recommended to swap the batts once in awhile too.

 

x3 what boggs said if you dont do both at once its like shootin yourself in the foot

 

I never saw it before, but apparently one of my batteries is a deep cycle. They are both champions and both looked the same, but one was a deep cycle (driver's side). I just so happen to have a pretty much new deep cycle in the garage which fit the bill. I then got a group 27 to replace the passenger side battery... Wal-Mart sells Johnson Control batteries branded "ever start" and they have always been fantastic... and this one comes with a 3 year free replacement. Anyways, it was the deep cycle that was killing the normal group 27 battery... both batteries had been fully depleted so many times that despite whatever problem they had initially, now they were probably toast just from that.

For what it's worth, they batteries I removed had manufacturing codes of March 2002. That's pretty impressive. The champion batteries were made by exide.

 

I'm not an Exide fan at all, I work at tractor supply and we sell Exides and I can guarantee that at least 2 batteries are already leaking just sitting on the shelf.

I ONLY run Interstate MTP 65's on anything of mine. They'll run you about 250 for the pair. Heck if one of them can survive two seasons in my demo derby car they gotta be a good bat cuz I don't run any kind of charging systems for them, plus they killer vibration that it goes through doesn't hold a candle to a normal street driven truck.

 

Interstate batteries are made by Johnson Controls.

 

Personally I'm a Diehard Gold fan... Never had one fail me!

-Enjoy
fh : )_~

 

Are you positive you don't have any battery drains? When we brought our clunker home we found it was leaving us with dead batteries allot, only a matter of time. Sometimes less than a week, sometimes the next morning.

Unknown history on the truck but it looks abused. We put off getting to the bottom of it to make sure it was driving ok and all that first.

When I got to taking out the dash we found some melted together wires including some to a radio that wasn't with the truck when we got it. Also a bad jumper into the fuse box from some hack.

Then we had the typical burnt wiring at the headlight switch harness as well as an original switch that was caked in crud.

Besides the discharging I would notice various degrees of starter power. I just figured it was a drain or a bad starter before pulling the dash off. We redid all the wiring and none of it changed. Also noticed a few times when the headlight position would do wierd things to the lights, even had them come on by themselves once?

We cleaned up all loose ends under the dash, cut out melted wires, new headlight switch and did the headlight and relay mods and everything has been good since.

Just a thought, I thought maybe these old trucks could have knocked something loose every time they were ran and wierder things have happened.

 

I decided to check for a drain the right way this time. I ended up buying a very expensive Fluke (any reason to convince the wife I need to buy tools) and it turns out there is a 0 rate of discharge according to my digital ammeter.

I did a little research on battery brands and this is what I came up with. The following brands are made by Johnson Controls:

ACDelco
Advance Auto
AutoCraft
AutoZone
Bosch
ChampionCostco
Delco
Delco-Remy
DieHard
Duralast
Equalizer
EverStart
Firestone
Interstate
Pep Boys
Optima
Motorcraft

Exide:

Autolite
Exide
Marathon
NAPA
Orbital

Marketing is an amazing thing isn't it? According to other information, the batteries are all made to the same standards of quality depending on their warranty... all 2 year free replacement batteries are essentially identical in quality of materials and construction. Get the cheapest ones you can find!!

 

Hello .16vjohn you dont have to haw flyke meter(expasiv fuses inside the fluke ) to check fore drain disconnet both battiry on put a regukar test light betwhen positiv cabel and pol and if the light are on you have a drain .start to remove fuse to find what drain