Simon1

It doesn't matter how much charge it is holding if it is hissing or leaking. Do you want a fine mist of battery acid be vented into your engine bay?

There is a vent on each side, on the top, between the terminals. There are built in vents that are designed to pop if the battery has a bad cell or is overcharged or is defective in some way. Sometimes a sulfur smell is present.

Remove battery, charge, look for leaks.

thedrod

Do you know the procedure they do to test the battery? If I go up there after I charged it, are they going to say, "nope, looks good to me."

Also do you know if AAP will let me upgrade to a yellow top for the price difference of the red?

157dB

20 miles on the freeway wont charge a dead or partially charged battery.
Battery charging is measured in amp/hours, not miles...

Check the voltage while cruising to see if the alternator is putting out.
A bad battery and it will kill your alternator soon enough...
Or your sound system has taxed your OEM alternator and toasted it.
A bigger battery wont power added amplifiers. A battery is a storage device,
not the electron producer.

You want red top for car starting and yellow top for trolling motors....
None the two will ever mix.....

Art161

If the vents have opened, I think the warranty is void.

hawkeye18

The battery test procedure is a fairly simple load test. I wanna say it's 300A? Anyway, the problem with the optimas is that she would tell them she could fix it... but it'd take two weeks. They either straight up thought she was lying... or needed a battery faster than two weeks (regular batteries will charge in 2-4 hours without much problem, but a day is preferred). So they would just buy another battery and turn the Optima in as a core.

Normally AAP ships all cores in on pallets, but one of the little-known policies is that employees can buy cores for... man, I think it used to be $35 but I couldn't even begin to tell you what it is now. Probably $50. So her store would put all Optima cores on the trickle charger for a couple of weeks, and if it tested good after that somebody (whoever needed a battery the most) bought it.

And I'm about 94% sure AAP isn't going to let you swap Optimas. That seems like something that would be rife for abuse.

You wanna know what the worst part is? My wife bought the blue top for her car because her car was blue! She had no idea the different tops meant different things! But hey, there's nothing wrong with a marine deep-cycle battery. F***er lasts forever.

pascal

Next, you will hear a message from the battery and after that, it will self destruct.
RUN!!RUN!!


Seriously, any noise/sound from a battery is bad news...
And like Simon says (lol), acid vapors is even worse news, especially with aluminum hoods.
You have to trace back what you did to the car electrically (if anything) in order to isolate the problem.
Batteries do explode (happened to me with a conventional one), and you don't want that.

Simon1

I had an Optima do this exact thing. It was a bad cell that caused the battery to out gas.

Remove battery!!!

CHARGE!!!

CHECK FOR LEAKS!

OP needs to read my above post.

thedrod

I've read all posts. I checked the battery and it visually seems fine. I also haven't hooked it up to a charger and it seems to be ok for the moment.

I need to figure out if there is a draw when the car is off. Because that battery was REALLY dead after 2 weeks...and again...no shaker.

What is a typical voltage for a good battery. I know its a 12V battery but what do they actually read when healthy? When I left work yesterday it was at 12.3.

Nuke

I typically expect to see about 12.6 volts for a used, charged battery that has sat for at least 12 hours (to allow any parasitic charge to dissipate). The 4 y/o OE battery in the g/f's Pony seems to have settled at about 12.3 volts and I'm keeping an eye on it.

Art161

Typically, a battery is considered to be fully charged if it is at about 12.65 volts. I think Optima says 12.7 volts for its batteries. As Nuke wrote, you need to let the battery sit for a number of hours. Otherwise you will be reading the surface charge. At 12.3 volts, the battery is about 60% charged.