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Rawze · 01-26-2017, **(Subject: Battery's )**

There are a lot of ways to check batteries, but nothing so far I have seen beats a thermal camera in checking them...

Weak plate in battery (second cell from the left shows a hot spot inside it) ...
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Alternator with diode pack going bad but not completely failed yet. Was putting slight A/C ripple into batteries, weakening them. This also causes the batteries to drain slowly when truck is shut off.
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Mis-matched cell (far left cell is hotter than the rest).
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The mounting bar was over-tightened on one side a bit and it weakened the bottom left of corner of a cell due to excess mechanical stress. The battery got weaker and weaker over time even after the bar was corrected. -- Yet another reason why a torque wrench is your friend.

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There are so many things that will shorten the life of batteries that it is not even funny. Just because someone says they have battery problems a lot does not mean they have cheap batteries. There could be a lot of other factors that come into play like shown above.

That is one of the reasons I like my thermal camera so much, I can spot problems like that on someones truck real fast. The sad part is that you cannot "feel" these hot spots. They are usually only a few degrees differences. Also the fact that it is not more common for shops to do this type of inspection/troubleshooting.