Happy car

A good battery makes for a happy car. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a lot of trouble with my car's electrical system. It seemed that every time it rains and I drive long distance and then get into heavy traffic where one needs to stop/go at a slow pace, the car started to "loose" power. The radio would shut off for a while and sometimes the car would completely switch off, causing some non-entertaining (especially when you are doing 120 km/h on the highway) back fires.

After six trips to three different shops (two of which is accredited VW service centers) the problem was still not fixed. So, after the car couldn't start due to a dead battery, I took the battery for acid test and it turned out that all six cells were dead. We replaced the battery and now the car is working perfectly again. The only concern I have now is that there is some root problem that caused the battery to die in the first place. I guess time will time.

The symptoms now makes sense. When it is raining, I use a lot of power (lights, heater, wipers, etc.) then as soon as I started to hit the heavy traffic I must stop. When you stop, the car's radiator fan sometimes switches on to cool the radiator. This extra load proved too be too much for the battery. I guess it shorted, actually an open circuit makes more sense for me here, but I do not know enough about the chemistry inside the battery. In the end this had nothing to do with wetness, but power consumption. It took me a while to see the correlation though :)

What bothers me about this story is that I would think that the battery is one of the items that an auto electrician will check when you ask them too look for electrical problems. Sad that none of the three did that.

On the positive side, I learned a bit about the electrical system in my Golf. I also learned that there is nothing arcane about the electrics in cars and that I can apply my electrical knowledge to cars as well.