My Optima battery doesn't seem to hold a charge anymore. I bought it about 5 years ago.
Is that normal?
I remember when I first went into the auto parts store to see if they could give me a regular car battery, they wanted a certain price for a regular car battery, but then I told them I could get an Optima for less on Amazon, and they stopped and said, "Dude, you gotta get the Optima, those things run forever."
Anyway. Back then I thought car batteries lasted 10 years on average. Now I looked it up again, and the consus is about 2-6 years. But I thought Optima would last longer than that.
Anyone here have any experience with Optima batteries?
5 years isn't bad at all. There is no straight answer, you can smoke a battery in months if it's dropping into the single digits or your charging regulation is bad, or it could last 10 years if you are lucky and in the perfect conditions.
Jack Brooks
thats a fancy battery mate
Isaiah Moore
optimas are only good when you need an AGM for reasons. like you REALLY dont want corrosion that can happen with a flooded battery. AGM has its place in classics and so on. are they as good as say a braille or whatever? fuck no
Landon Brown
Actually, I think it's possible that my Optima battery has been depleted faster because my HV Hybrid batteries are near dead. So the 12v Optima battery has had to step in.
My Prius is 13 years old and still has the original HV batteries. I've been driving recently, and the hybrid electric equipment turns off, so I only have the engine, so basically, no power steer, no power brakes, no air conditioning, no hybrid propullsion. All I have is a small amount of horse power when I step on the gas and I have to steer by hand and push the brake pedal hard to stop.
Aaron Perez
>single digits
The fuck are you talking about, bro.
Batteries last LONGER in cold conditions, and LESS LONGER in hot conditions.
Gavin Rivera
>braille Never heard of these Braille batteries. Is that supposedly the best?
Logan Russell
>prius moar liek HIV batteries, amirite
Oliver Thomas
I have an optima. I got it from amazon for only 20 bucks over a normal battery. It was already a year old from the date sticker and now 1.5 years later it's still fine.
Eli Thomas
Wow, okay, no, so I bought this battery less than 4 years ago. What the fuck, man.
3 years, 5 months.
Robert Smith
I was talking about single digit voltage, not temp
Elijah Harris
I just hooked up the charger. Keep getting trouble code.
Austin Martin
There are only 3 car battery manufacturers. Brailles are East Penn batteries with a different sticker on them sold for 3x the price. If you want a Braille just buy the Deka stickered battery of the same specs. Optimas are made by Johnson Controls who make a shitton of other brands. If you ever hear anyone say "Yeah man always get Interstate, and never buy that Die Hard crap" chances are they may be talking about two identical batteries with different stickers on them. Just do your research and you'll find which of the 3 manufacturers makes a battery and you'll be able to find a generic, internally identical version for a fraction of the cost
Yeah, looks like this guy had the exact same problem. Luckily he returned it within 3 years.
Damn shame too. My car has been sitting in the garage for the last 6 months.
Jayden Rivera
I'm pretty sure that both the Sears and Wal Mart AGMs are JC made which would make them the same as the Optima (they obviously don't have the fancy 6 pack case). All the info is available here, but it's convoluted jgdarden.com/batteryfaq/batbrand.htm About half way down the page is a list of all the Johnson Controls sub brands
Started watching this vid of top 10 car batteries.
Number 10 was Optima. So that's a bad sign. Means it's the worst out of all 10 batteries named in that review. I didn't even know that many car batteries existed.
Brody Gutierrez
Pretty much every car made after 1994 is going to have a small parasitic draw, you should either disconnect the battery or put it on a tender if it's not going to move for 6 months
Benjamin Miller
So you're saying that because I had the battery hooked up to a car that has shit running even in minimal amounts for months, the battery died to the point where it couldn't hold a charge anymore?
Thomas Reed
This page is fucking huge. Wtf am I looking for.
Nolan Campbell
You aren't going to get any good info from videos like that, it's someone who has never touched the batteries comparing spec sheets provided by the manufacturer, it means nothing. > I didn't even know that many car batteries existed. Lots of different stickers exist, that doesn't mean there are that many different battery architectures, just like there are thousands of different cordless drill, flashlight, RC car, etc. batteries but they are all build from 18650 cells from a handful of manufacturers
David Barnes
Says their number 1 battery is the Optima Red Top series. Which is slightly cheaper than the yellow top series. Wtf.
Luke Cruz
AGM batteries don't like to be drained fully, but that wasn't the only reason, that combined with age killed the battery. There is no clear answer, it's not like if the battery drops to 10 volts 9 times it will spontaneously die on the 10th time, or if it goes to 1 volt once it will reduce the life by x%, there are too many variables, that's why there's no answer to "how long should a battery last." How long do brake pads last? Depends how you use them.
It will tell you who makes pretty much every 12v car battery on the market, and yes it's a mess
Kevin Gray
>AGM batteries don't like to be drained fully
This yellow top Optima battery is specifically called a deep cycle battery. Meaning you can cycle it all the way to empty and recharge it in a short space of time.
Logan Kelly
the tabs kind of give away that you have no gf
Jordan Mitchell
>all the way to empty Not a chance the manufacturer recommends that, maybe to 50% charge but not 5% as one would have if they left a modern car sitting for 6 months).
Leo Hill
I ain't no battery expert or nothin but a lot of batteries that people condem are actually just fine, they just need a proper charge. And no, jumping your car and driving it for 50 miles isn't a proper charge.
Carter Bennett
OP here.
I finally got it to charge by connecting another battery in parallel with the charger and battery.
Elijah Martin
That's funny. right after I did this, I found this video that does the exact same thing.
Although, I think I might have done this before, and the charger said it was fully charged at one point. But after a few days of not using the car, the battery was once again completely dead.
Angel Peterson
Red top is for stereos, it's good because it can handle a really high current draw quickly.
Sebastian Wilson
Wtf are you talking about. Yellow top is for stereos. Red top is just for starting.
>Red tops are for vehicles with shallow power draw.
Also, because Yellow tops are cheaper on Amazon than Red tops, no one actually buys red tops.
Aiden Cook
I wouldn't trust that battery tho
5 years aint all too bad, quite normal for a standard battery that isn't regularly maintained. To make them last longer I recommend dual-battery setups, checking/filling water every month if possible, charging it weekly and never running it empty
Previous owner of my Toyota maintained its batteries really well, resulting in both of those batteries being able to singel-handedly start up the truck in -15c/5f at the ripe old age of 13
Still, they did only hold a portion of their previous power and capacity so I wouldn't depend on them
Cameron Miller
I was wrong, it wasn't 5. It's 3.5 years.
I get what you're saying about not trusting it though... I have that feeling with it now too, since I left it in the garage unused for 4 or 5 days unused and the battery was completely dead again.
I'll put my volt meter to it after 3 days of charging and see what it's at.
Brayden Reed
Never knew you could put water in batteries. Is that correct thing to do?
AGM batteries probably will never need that.
Hunter Kelly
Once it's got some voltage back in it (10.5v+), put it on a trickle charger to bring it back up, drain it back down to around 11v and trickle it back up again., see if it comes good.
Modern lead acid batteries are lucky to have a 3 year warranty anyway
Owen Cox
Works for non-sealed lead acid batteries, you could top the acid up with water and give them a gentle charge and get a few more years life out of them.
Modern ones are disposable 3 year trash, though, especially in modern cars that do 1,000 things after you've turned the engine off and constantly draw power to detect a key fob within range.
Christian Moore
Man, this almost makes me want to connect my car battery to the 12v charger every time I pull into the garage.
>Red Top for Stereos >1 year old battery >Holding 0 charge.
Adrian Young
Don't need to go that far, if you haven't started it for a week or longer put a charger on it for 15 minutes first so you're not pulling the voltage down too far, and don't do 5 minute drives. It's bad for every part of your car, not just the battery.
Cells (the compartments of the battery that hold acid and the lead plates) that run dry are ruined, lowering your capacity and output.
Modern acid batteries are sadly nearly always maintenance free and sealed, meaning that what runs dry remains dry. The best thing to refill with is water mixed with 30-50% sulphuric acid as that is what it uses. Typically you'll top them off with just plain battery water (de-ionized water), which does work fine although it dilutes the water/acid mix
And yeah, AGM doesnt need that. In an AGM the acid is absorbed into very fibe glass mats in the battery, making them "solid", spill proof and also a lot tougher when it comes to being run empty & charged again
Just charge it back up broski, hit it with a fuckton of amps if you need to get it back up above 9v, otherwise trickle charge it up to 12.5v, then get a nice constant load on it (a light) and drop it back down to 11v, now trickle charge it back up to 13.2v and let it sit and see if it's discharging with no load on it, if it isn't then it's all good senpai. If it is, shit's fucked
Connor Brown
Gonna need to reread that a few times for me to make sense.
Nathan Lopez
Where did you get this method from?
Brody Myers
Trial and error, i've done that a bunch of times and brought a decent amount of batteries back to at least a little bit of life, although with lower voltages for lead acids (the 13.2 figure is from optimas website)
Joshua Reyes
Obtain adjustable battery charger and multimeter Measure battery voltage If
Kayden Parker
Will do.
Aiden Myers
Gonna use another battery to parallel charge it to 9v. Then use my 1.5 amp charger to get it to 12.5.
Charles Brooks
If you ever have a serviceable lead acid (little things you can unscrew on the top), if you ever kill it you can top up the fluid and do pretty much that same method and most of the time it'll come back for at least a few months
Also protip, don't go above 14v on a lead acid because you'll either kill it or enjoy acid fumes if it vents
Xavier Reyes
So my multimeter doesn't even do decimals. Anyway, it read 12. So that's above 11.5.
So I ran the Xenon lights for a few seconds to bring it down to 10.
Cameron Edwards
Now the trickle charger is actually detecting the resistance without another battery and is actually charging. That's good.
Gonna leave this on here for a few days.
Jace Long
Broke my fucking probe again.
Cheap Chinese shit.
Blake Jones
>My Optima battery doesn't seem to hold a charge anymore.
If you let an AGM run down too often, even the best ones will have shortened life span. That's why you pay attention to the amount of charge remaining in a battery and top it off as needed with a better quality digital battery charger. A charger doesn't have to be expensive and they're all well under $100. You can even get a decent digital schumacher charger at walmart. Don't get a harbor freight one.
Don't overcharge.
If you have a lot of short trips, then your battery can run down if it is a stop/start type of car. Today's cars also draw a lot of parasitic current when stopped. My new car probably would kill a battery if left alone for a month.
Caleb Butler
If the battery is down to 70% then you can top it off. The thing is to not use too high a charging current. The 6 to 8 amperes setting is a good maximum charge current.
Even though my digital battery charger switches to a trickle current when it senses the battery is at 100%, I still take off the charger. It's a dual-battery car and I'm never quite sure if parasitics and the condition of the 2nd battery influences the charger into some "race condition". When trickling to the AGM cell, my charger typically is at 13.3 volts, but there have been a very very few times it was 14.4 or even 15.6 volts. So I assume the charger had been fooled into some bad condition even though the display says the battery is 100%. I don't assume the battery charger has infallible logic for trickle charging.
Leo Bailey
You need to take it in to get the HV battery checked out, either it's nearly dead as you're saying or there's a problem in the HV electrical system. I'd get that done ASAP, you're running the risk of the HV battery dying completely and having to have the car towed to the shop.
Kayden Butler
Yeah, that's why I don't drive that car anymore. I'm planning a trip to California to buy an $800 replacement HV battery pack.
I know for a fact that it's the HV battery, because when I drive my gf's Prius, the gas pedal is very torquy and responsive unlike mine, which takes literally 4 seconds to get power from the gasoline powered engine. I also took the battery pack out a few years ago, and the cells had all degraded evenly.
Usually, what happens when I drive it, the engine halfway dies like I described before, and I have enough power to pull over and restart the car.
Lincoln Murphy
>My car has dual batteries.
I'm wondering if I should install one of these in my dash,
And install a 2nd battery, in case my 12v ever dies, I can just switch to the 2nd battery.
since it's a prius, I'm thinking about connected a few of the cells of the HV battery to add up to 12v in a separate array (not sure if that's possible, since they're always connected, but if not, I'll just install a 2nd 12v).
