So my car has been very sluggish to start due to what I thought was a low battery. I have a red top that isn't even a year old. I checked it out last night with a multimeter it read 12.5 volts. This is pretty much fully charged. I hit it with the charger anyway last night and it brought it up to 12.7V. Tried to start it this morning and it would barely start again. Any ideas?

 

I would do the basics prelim checks and make sure you have good clean, tight connections on the battery and the pos/neg terminal posts on the shock tower. Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have the battery tested. I had an Optima Red Top and it basically displayed the same symptoms where it wouldn't hold a full charge and would make for either a very difficult startup or no startup at all. When I tried to get the battery warrantied at AZ, they kept insisting it was fine. I gave up, bought another Delco, and had no problems.

 

Wonderful, I payed too much for this battery to have it be a dud. Yeah, I'll check the connections, forgot to do that last night. Thanks!

 

If they sit to long it will shortin the life of them. You can get a charger you leave on it if the car sits for long periods. You need it check for more than volts to see if it any good.

 

bad starter, bad cable to the starter(increased resistance)

and a battery with a shorted cell can still read good voltage, load test the battery

 

that is very true there. a shorted celled battery can read perfect voltage (have had 3 of them over the years). A load test is a goo way to go about doing it. One thing to note on the optima's is they are a little different for charging than your standard wet cell battery. They like a certain voltage range when charging heh.

I have a red top as well. last time i was in the dealer said i needed a new battery because it only outputted 500cca instead of the 800cca on the top. Battery is fine though (just needed to be charged lol)


Go and have the thing load tested after it has been charged. else a load test will not do you any good either, as it will not give an accurate output.

I bought a black and decker battery charger that does a bunch of test on the battery while it attempts to charge them. Costs like 80$ and does wet cell, gell cell, and AGM.

 

Can autozone load test it? And can your battery charger load test?

 

Sounds like the Red Top I had after 6 months in a low use vehicle.

 

Mine is a daily driver though? The only thing is this is the first week it's been driven in 2 weeks because I was having my tranny rebuilt.

 

AZ can charge and test your battery.