Nothing puts a downer on any typical day quite like a flat battery. You expect your car to perform faithfully as it always does, you turn the key and…nothing. Immediately, every single plan you had for the foreseeable future goes out of the window.
Even if you’re savvy enough to carry a portable jump-starting device, you’re still in for an annoying and inconvenient challenge.
When this happens from time to time, it’s not necessarily anything to worry about. In fact, the vast majority of motorists will occasionally find themselves dealing with a flat battery. But when you find yourself dealing with a battery that keeps dying on a regular basis, it’s safe to say that something isn’t quite right.
The question being – what?
While there are technically hundreds of reasons your battery keeps continuously dying, most such issues can be attributed to just a handful of common problems. So rather than banging your head against a brick wall, you might want to look into the following possible explanations:
1. Leaving the Lights On
Car batteries are surprisingly powerful, but are somewhat powerless when it comes to keeping the lights on. This applies to both interior and exterior lights alike – accidentally leave one or more lights on with the engine off and you could be looking at a flat battery in less than an hour. The drain the average car light puts on a dormant battery is enormous. Hence, this is the number one cause of flat car batteries across the UK.
2. Gadgets Plugged In
In most instances, leaving your phone charging in the cigarette lighter socket isn’t going to have a huge impact on your battery’s capacity. When it comes to things like laptops, certain tablet computers and other gadgets however, it’s not quite so simple. Depending on the size and capacity of the battery of the respective device, you could easily annihilate your car’s battery in no time at all.
3. Extreme Temperatures
On the plus side, car batteries that go flat due to extreme temperatures can’t exactly be blamed on the respective motorist. So you can at least take comfort in the fact that it isn’t your fault! Cars exposed to extreme heat or excessively cold temperatures for any period of time without being put into use face a significantly higher likelihood of discharging and leaving you stranded.
4. Connectivity Issues
It could also be that the electronics and respective connections in and around the battery have become faulty for one reason or another. This isn’t something you’re realistically going to be able to check yourself, unless you’re proficient with the complexities of auto-electrics. If in doubt, book an inspection with a reliable mechanic.
5. Old or Damaged Batteries
Last but not least, if your car battery is in any way damaged or simply long in the tooth, it isn’t going to be able to hold its charge nearly as reliably as it used to. There comes a time in the life of every car battery when it needs to be either reconditioned or replaced. The good news being that in this day and age, even the highest-quality car batteries on the market aren’t what you’d call expensive.
Just ensure you dispose of your previous car battery responsibly – contact a member of the Take My Scrap Car team if you have any questions.
