So thanks to a certain three year old leaving my car lights on without me realising it, I ended up with a flat battery a few days back!
A neighbour gave me a little knock and told me my lights were on, I was surprised as I had thought the lights turned off automatically when I locked the car... in fact I'm sure they do, so i mused have nudged the key accidentally and re-opened it.
Anyway, on trying to start it up it just sounded wheazy, gradually getting slower and more pathetic with the second, third, fourth attempts, and by the fifth it was clear it was never going to start!
Thankfully I have a decent battery charger and so I simply connected it up, selected car mode and let it do its thing.
This wasn't quite as simple as I thought it would be - I had to Chat GPT which was the correct terminal, I guess the big plus sign on one of them should have been a giveaway, but there you go.
And then there was the not so good advice about connecting the negative lead to some other bit of metal rather than the negative battery terminal to avoid a spark risk, I ignored this, got a small spark, so what!
The starting voltage was 12.8 which is apparently on the low side when charging, so I let it have a good run....
I was a bit on edge about the prospect of rain - it held off, but given the set up above this wouldn't have been ideal...
After a couple of hours charging or thereabouts a nice guy knocked on the door who had jump cables (connected via a box presumably offering some kind of protection to his own battery).
I'm fairly sure my charger was doing a stirling job anyways - the voltage was ticking up nicely, at 13.6 before this guy turned up - but I wasn't going to look this gift horse in the mouth either!
The car started straight away with the jump assistance, normally it churns a little, but this little test (which was really the guy's rational for me doing it) shows that churn really is the battery being old, it's 10 years old!
I let car idle a while, went for a drive for 30 mins and happy days, no problem since!
