September 27, 2009
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Bleah. Looks like the battery for my car finally gave out. Kinda stranded... I'll get back to this blog in a bit.. Edit
Okay, to be honest I've got myself to blame for this, as "buy new car battery" has been on my "to buy list" for a couple of months now. I knew my car battery was going to die sometime in the near future, but I went ahead and took the risk of procrastinating on something necessary such as this anyway. A little over 95,000 miles is how long this battery lasted until it gave up on me, so I suppose that's at least some achievement. I was about 30 miles away from home when this happened, so there was a bit of bad luck to this. Although just an hour before it happened, I was over 40 miles away from home, so where I was is an improvement. I was with my friends at the time too, so that's also a plus.
I did call my wife to come over to where I was (isn't she great?), since she has membership to AAA. I didn't want to jump the battery myself, so I opted for a professional to do it. When my battery was finally jumped and ready to go, the first thing that I had in mind was hoping it lasts on the drive home. 30 miles is a relatively long distance, and my car has manual shifting, so I was thinking that this better not be the time I screw up with the clutch and stall. I started getting concerned when my head lights started turning off then back on just about every minute. It's like my battery wanted to die again, but it's forcing itself to stay alive. There were about two occasions where my car jerked a little bit, because I believe the battery tried to die again, which caused my car to "almost" turn off while I was in motion. It was enough of a jerk to my car or whatever to get my check engine light to turn on though, and my ABS light turned on then off for two occasions as well.
About a half an hour later, I did manage to get home safe. I was lucky enough to constantly be in motion, via the freeway, always hitting the green light, and did one rolling stop on a stop sign (sorry). The only time I had to actually brake to a stop was when I got home. So luckily I did not put myself in a position where my car was on idle too long, which probably helped decrease any chance of it idling to the point of turning off.
When I wake up in the morning, I'm gonna have to finally buy a new car battery.
Let this be a lesson to everybody else. Don't procrastinate too much when you know that your car battery is almost dead.
Comments (3)
= dang. good thing ya got home!
Your car is manual? You need to learn to start the car by popping the clutch.
@darren_macintyre - I knew for a fact that the battery was dead, so I didn't want to risk anything. I've been informed that dead batteries often cannot be push-started. I was also in a parking lot with not much space for error, so I simply wanted to play it safe.
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