Save Money Testing Your Own Battery

Hey everyone, so this is my wife's Lexus right here and The other day we got out of the car turned the keys off all the windows and the moonroof and everything started just Opening and closing doing all kinds of weird stuff on their own and usually what that occurs It's either a source voltage bomb for the computer Or it's a computer starting to go haywire on its own so Looking at the batteries real quick and using a tool That's probably the most basic of the ways I have to test a battery available to me But one that I wanted to show you guys so that you could maybe share it with people and friends that aren't Mechanics as a quick way to test the health of their battery so they don't end up getting stranded Extreme weather extreme heat down here in Arizona extreme cold both are bad on batteries age another thing that can affect batteries and Corrosion right so if we look at my wife's batteries reading to 12.7 right now And if we come in here, and we start her up All right, so we're going to come in here. I'm going to step on the brake pedal we're going to Start this guy all right, so we have 12.7 with the engine off And if we look at it now we have 13.3 So I wanted to show you guys what this looks like on my truck So that we can understand the difference in what we're seeing here, okay? So we're going to come over here to the GMC Canyon And we're going to hook this guy up Doing everything with one hand phone in the other hand all right, so we got this guy and hook the ground up All right, so now we're seeing that I have 12.5 So it's resting voltage. She's got a healthier battery than I do But now let's start mine up and see what happens when we're running All right, so you can see mine is climbing right now. It's at 13.8 getting ready to go to 13.9 After does this for a little bit recovers from the cranking amps from starting the engine it should get up above 14 volts the fact that I'm only seeing 13.3 volts on this one is Making me think that maybe what's happening is that the battery is getting charged and charging up but whenever you have All right, so I learned something new today I learned that when your phone automatically connects to your Bluetooth Car play device it stops whatever you're recording so when I started the truck it cut me off So what we're talking about here right now Is that this thing is maxing out at 13.3 volts where if I come over here, and I look at my truck It's getting up to 13 7 13 8 13 9 Which is a little bit more what I would expect to see on this Would I rely on this and say I'm replacing the alternator right now Absolutely, not I would either take it to a place that had a proper Charging battery system tester, or I would use the one I have But if you are not a mechanic, and you are just trying to figure this out on your own This is a great little tool to let you know if you need to go and get more help Or if it might be time to take this and get it professionally tested So great little tool for the non-mechanics to have in their car just to occasionally check their battery and charging system health