My battery almost quit working. It would barely start my car. I opened up the battery cells with a quarter and then filled each one with tap water. As you can see in the pics, there is an indicator (black plastic tab) in the battery which indicates when to stop adding water. I used my wife's turkey baster (dont tell her and included it in a pic
to add the water. The turkey baster allowed me to add incremental amount of water while watching the results with a flash light with a fair amount of precision. I then charged my battery all night with a trickle charge and today it worked great! I saved the money of buying a new battery and it took me about 20 minutes of time total.
*Obvious disclosures*
* Use a face shield while adding water. I did.
* when you screw off each battery cell cap be careful not to touch the battery acid. It can really hurt you.
* After I was done, I thought it would be preferable to do one cell at a time instead of doing them all at one time. That way you will be less prone to touch the acid....which I did not.
I added 1 1/2 viles of water per cell which was kinda strange to me. Each one needed the same amount of water. weird.
I haven't made a post for along time so I added my car and my wheels which took me along time to wash today. It was a little cloudy, but still the car looked amazing.
Enjoy!
i believe that smart money says not to use tap water to refill a radiator but to use distilled water instead.
jD
Use distilled water vs tap water.
I think it is mainly the charger extending the battery's life, water can only help a little. I recently have to put in a new battery even the the old one was full of acid.
So how often should these levels be checked? One more thing I need to be paranoid about, along with the oil and disappearing coolant...
Pete, It shows up on the minor maintenance checklists 1 and 2 so looks like yearly mininmum.
This brings back memories! My dad used to do this on his old VW in the '50's...he even would check the strength of the acid! I used to try to save my batteries for years on my older cars, but often once a cell starts to go there's not much you can do....so the fix may not last forever unless you were just low on acid and all the cells are healthy.
This being said I just replaced my 4 year old battery because it was getting weak starting...it was at the shop and even though I had the feeling the battery was losing it I didn't bother...so I got lazy and let the mechanic swap it...maybe I should have looked at it
