Hard Start? Not Starting? Clicks? Find Out Why | Dead Battery Alternator Starter Test

hey it's Josh with budget mechanic and today I'm going to address a very common car issue where you get in you stick your key in the ignition and turn it and you just get a bunch of clicking or the engine barely turns over struggles to start and when that happens it's 95% of the time gonna be one of three things it's gonna be your starter or your alternator or your battery and the wiring associated today I've got a 2010 Honda Odyssey the owner just put a new battery in a year ago but they're saying that they're having a hard time starting it sometimes won't start at all and so we're gonna walk through the diagnostic steps to figure out what's going on so one thing you're gonna need to test your alternator and battery is gonna be a basic multimeter and just something that can read DC volts and amps and you probably pick one of these up for cheap 20 bucks maybe I'll put a link to one in the description so the way this works is when the car is running the alternator is charging your battery and then when the car is off your battery powers the starter in order to get your car running again we want to do a process of elimination on these three things and I'm gonna start with the starter so we're gonna try to turn it over and if we can get it cranked at least know that the starters working will eliminate that part now there are some obvious clues that will happen that will point to a problem such as the battery light coming on your dash which is pointing to an alternator or that chattering sound when you try to start the car which usually points to a bad battery but you're going to want to go through the full diagnostic process to really nail down what the problem is if your starter is bad most likely all you're gonna hear when you turn the key is a single click or maybe nothing at all when I tried to start this car I heard it struggling to turn over but it was turning over so I know the starter was engaging and it's probably not the problem it's got to be something else now if you were getting the symptoms of a bad starter it's not necessarily conclusive so I would still go ahead and check your alternator in your battery before you go out and buy something that you don't before I get too involved in the process I always check my terminals to make sure they're nice and tight because if they spin or they're loose at all that'll throw in a whole bunch of other symptoms that can be really confusing so make sure your terminals are nice and tight the next issue that we want to diagnose is the alternator in order to do that I have to have the car running so because I wasn't able to get it running before I'm gonna have to jumpstart it you can use another car with jumper cables or one of these little boxes with a jumper pack she started right up when being jumped so that's another way I know that most likely my starter is okay when connected to another battery source it started right up fine now I just need to figure out is it the battery that's the problem or is it the alternator that's supposed to be charging the battery the problem now we're gonna check the alternator in order to do that you need your multimeter set to DC volts I'm gonna put my red lead on the positive terminal black lead on the negative and I'm getting 14 volts at idle a properly functioning alternator should give you somewhere around 13 and a half to 14 volts if it's lower than that especially if it's down around 13 or under 13 you know you have a failing alternator which is not going to charge your battery enough to start the car later on but because this is at 14 I know this alternator is good so we've narrowed it down to a battery problem there's a couple reasons why that could be the main and most obvious one is how old the battery is a good battery should last three or four years the owner said this one was a year and a half should be fine but let's double check they have a sticker with a date on it some batteries have this little chart where you can scratch off the date when you buy the battery so they are right it's a little over a year old should be fine the next thing I'm going to check on this battery is the cables that come in to the terminals and I'm gonna check if there's broken wires or if they're loose I can see a bunch of this white powdery stuff in here inside so there is quite a bit of corrosion and if that builds up enough it'll break connectivity to this terminal and you'll get problems so I'm probably gonna want to clean that up checking on the other side making sure these wires are good and solid not fraying or breaking just as a side note you may have heard about the old trick where you disconnect one of your terminals while the car is running pull it off and if the car stays running your alternator is okay that's fine but I don't think that gives you a good indication as whether your alternator is on its way out or not it just tells you if it's really bad this is a much more accurate way to tell the condition of your alternator last thing we're going to do is check the battery system for parasitic draw which basically means we're gonna make sure nothing is drawing power from the battery after the vehicle's been shut off before you do this test you want to make sure that the car's been off for about 15 minutes so that all the systems are fully shut down its first I'm going to set up my meter when I go to DC amps and then I'm going to flip my red wire over to the HAMP's pork and then I'm gonna go ahead and loosen them terminal on the positive you can do positive or negative doesn't really matter before I disconnect it I'm gonna hook this up if you have any alligator clips it makes it a lot easier you don't need as many hands but essentially you want to put one lead on the wire and one lead on the post so that when you separate it the connection stays holding through the meter so I'm going to clip it on here and then I'm going to stick it underneath onto the post so that now I'll be able to move this away but it's still connected so you can see my meters showing 0.2 0.1 dur 50 milliamps is acceptable so this is an acceptable parasitic draw and it's not the problem the battery's having so we've traced the hard start problems of this car back to the battery and it's a little odd because it's only a little over a year old but there's a few reasons that can happen one of which is it's just a bad battery that happens the other is maybe the owner killed the battery a lot leaving the headlights on dome light on I don't know but batteries can't handle that too many times before they become permanently damaged and can't hold the same amount of charge as before so I'm just gonna go ahead and clean these terminals I'm gonna put the battery on a trickle charge overnight get it all charged up and hand it back to them and see if it made a difference if not I'm pretty sure they're going to need a new battery thanks for watching I hope this was helpful if you haven't already please subscribe and we'll see you next time

Channel: Budget Mechanic Hawaii

Views: 862,910

Keywords: Diagnose Hard Start Honda, car wont start, car wont start but clicks, car starter problem sound, diagnose starter problems, car new battery won't start, car wont start but cranks, car doesn't start, no start, dead car battery, car battery, bad alternator, turn on clicks, car turn on won't start, why won't car start, car no start, car no crank, test battery, test alternator, test starter, not starting car, not starting, clicking when turn key, car clicks when starting

Id: H1Y2mMkn_aw

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2018