How to Maintain Your Car Battery

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Not sure how you can maintain your car battery?

While you may be quite strict about keeping your car clean and supported from the outside, you may have been ignoring under the hood too often.

If so, chances are you’ve been neglecting your car battery and denying the car what it needs to working properly. After all, of what use is a sparkling, well-kept car if it doesn’t even start in the morning, making you late for work?

Obviously, all of your effort into making sure your car remains spotless on the outside would definitely be pointless in this scenario.

As such, making sure your battery is in tip-top shape is imperative.

Easy task

Still, it’s not like maintaining your battery is too difficult a task to complete. You only really need to check on it once every 2-3 months and perform only a few simple tasks to take care of it.

So, here are all the things you need to do to take care of your battery:

Checking the level of water every 2-3 months

Though checking for water levels is pointless if your car uses a maintenance-free battery , if you’ve got a wet-cell non-maintenance-free battery installed in your car, you’d need to check the fluid levels every 2-3 months or so.

If you want to check the fluid levels, you should unscrew/open the fluid caps and see whether the water levels are below the designated mark.

If so, carefully fill up the battery with distilled water, taking care not to overfill it. Replace the cap when you are done, and you will be good to go.

Protecting the battery from high temperatures

If you find protecting your battery from cold weather important to prevent freezing, you should just as well protect it from extremely high temperatures. Usually, the car battery quality depreciates faster in extremely hot temperatures than in extremely cold temperatures.

Nevertheless, protecting the battery from heat isn’t really that hard of a task. All you need is some heat resistant grease to slather over the battery exterior, or even get an insulator to cover your battery. Both of these would work just fine to form a barrier between your battery and unwanted heat to guard against damage

Cleaning off the battery terminals of battery acid corrosion

Now, dried-up acid corrosion on terminals is one of the most common battery problems you will encounter when taking care of your battery.

Ordinarily, your car battery produces hydrogen gas that reacts with the terminals to leave unwanted, disgusting bluish-white gunk on your battery terminals.

So, you need to clean this off if your battery is to perform optimally. Prepare a paste made of baking soda and water and apply it on a wire brush which you’ll use to scrape off the gunk gently.

Safety first

Be sure to don protective gear like face masks and goggles when performing this task; you don’t want to be inhaling this stuff or letting any of it brush off and fly into your eyes. Though it does need to be said that this is one problem you can’t completely solve.You’ll have to clean this gunk off your car battery time and again.

The silver lining here though, is that you only need do so once every 6-8 months.

Checking your battery’s voltage and recharging when necessary

You can almost always tell if your battery is running low before it dies out. This is picked from indicator panels and dimming headlights.

The most effective way, however, is using a voltmeter. This way, you are sure to determine the exact power left in your battery. It just gets the guesswork out of the way, making you more aware of the state of your battery.

As long as your battery levels are close .to 12.5 or 12.6 V, you’re not in the woods yet.

Use a trickle charger

If you do need to charge your battery, however, take your car to an auto electrician or charge it from home usinga trickle charger. This allows youto avoid the additional service costs altogether.

Though taking your car to the auto shop is important at least once every 6-9 months, there are some things you can’t completely take care of on your own.