I can’t stress this point to people enough. I always suggest how important it is to keep up the battery and battery terminals during the changing seasons. In the winter time there is a lot of stress put on a battery and it is one of the most neglected times because people are in a hurry to warm their cars up for the heater and they don’t ever think to check the little things such as the battery cables or the terminals or the battery water level.
I’ve helped many people that thought their battery needed to be replaced because it would exhibit slow turn over to the engine or it would show a low power draw to the dome lights or to the instrument panel dummy lights.
One of the first things I ever check would be the battery terminal connections. If the terminal connections look ok, I would strip back some of the insulation on the battery cable and look for any corrosion that may or may not exist that could be causing some of the problems, but in this case what I was working on today, was an 2005 Jeep Liberty where the battery terminals had a severe amount of battery corrosion so I used battery acid cleaning solution, but I still opted to remove them to give them a finely detailed cleaning and put in the battery post felt corrosion terminal protectors to help cut down on this type of problem ever happening again.
But I cleaned up the battery post and the existing battery terminals to give it that great new car look and to put a smile on MY face. Now the owner knows he’s not going to have this problem come up in the future. Also with this post, I will be showing you the tools that I used for this job. The owner of this Jeep had recently purchased his battery so we didn’t need to check the water level. I just want to mention again the importance of checking the water level. That single action has extended the lives of many batteries.
I also want to mention that the change of seasons is pretty brutal on batteries for winter or summer so always remember to check it often. I check our 2 batteries often, and whenever I see a neighbor or a friend that is having problems with their car, some of the times it winds up being poor battery maintenance.
