On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 21:34:49 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 9/15/2018 7:43 PM, wrote:
On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 17:38:29 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:
The original OEM battery in my former Ford F-250 lasted for a full eight
years but when today's batteries go bad there's often very little
warning. I remember the day it died. When I first started the truck
in the morning I sorta sensed that it didn't turn over as quickly as
it normally did but the difference was minimal. I realized it was
probably going bad so I headed for AutoZone to get a replacement.
I intended to drive home, swap the batteries (didn't have any tools
with me) and return with the old one for the core charge. Got
into the truck in the AutoZone parking lot, went to start it and it
didn't even grunt. Dead.

Did you go back in and borrow a socket wrench. They brag about having
loaner tools. My wife would have had them install the battery but that
may just be a girl thing. ;-)
I have swapped out several batteries in the Walmart parking lot. If I
know I have a shaky one (like having to jump the car to get it going)
I go straight to WM with the tools I need and take the dead soldier in
with me. No muss no fuss. You can usually do the whole thing at the
auto service desk with a side trip to the battery rack. Since the
price is usually about the same I get the biggest battery that will
fit in the hole regardless of what was there before. Sometime a Group
24 is even cheaper than the smaller one the OEM used and they usually
fit.



Yeah, AutoZone was kind enough to lend me some wrenches. It was still
quite a project in the parking lot though. The engine compartment on
the Superduty series Fords is pretty high and balancing yourself on the
skinny front bumper while hefting the old battery out and the new one in
was a bitch. The battery and it's replacement was a big
son of a gun because the truck had the plow package which included a
higher output alternator and a big ass battery.

Still not anything like changing the three 8D batteries in the
Navigator. Those suckers were about 150 lbs each and hauling
the old ones out of the engine room, then loading the new ones on the
boat, down the hatch and into the engine room by myself wasn't
a fun job. I had to replace them because the big, 3 output
ferro-resonant type charger that came with the boat "cooked" the batteries
over the course of about six months when I left the Navigator in Florida
when we returned to MA for the summer. I hired a guy to look after the
boat while we were gone (he scraped the bottom every month) but he
never thought to check the water in the batteries. Not his fault though
because I didn't think of it either.

The newer, high capacity, switching power supply "smart chargers" with
multiple outputs were just becoming popular and available at the time
and I replaced the original charger with one of them when I replaced the
batteries. Wasn't cheap, but neither were the batteries. Never had an
issue after that and it didn't boil off the battery water like the
original charger did.


===

I've replaced all of our 8D batteries with 2 group 31 AGMs in
parallel. They have more cold cranking amps than a single 8D. I'm
getting much better life out of them, with less maintenance, and much
easier replacement effort. The physical footprint is slightly
different but not radically.