Smart to Remove Battery to Clean and Remove Corrosion?

Leave it alone if you are not experiencing problems.

 

Since it is a 2001 it will not hurt at all to inspect it, look at the voltages, and if you see corrosion anywhere, clean it off. In your case it is a very good idea.


:cheer2:

 

I'm going to vote with, the ol' cliche, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Especially at the age of your battery. To me? You've gotten a decade of reliable use out of it. You may get years more. But it's at an age where I think if it fails? It fails.

I don't think I'd be adverse to a visual inspection...which I'd think everyone should just do from time to time. BUT..I don't think I'd go so far as to remove the whole battery.

I think with a decade behind you? You just have to be at the point where you believe the battery is good, until it fails. Then you can address what needs to be done, which may be as extensive as total replacement or rebuild.

 

It would be reasonable to remove the cover and look at the busbars and the battery terminals. Then you can decide whether to reinstall the cover, or if it would be worthwhile to remove the battery from the car so that it can be disassembled. This, of course, assumes that you know what you are doing.

 

I confess I am thinking more about doing that myself, given the undesirable failure mode that Mr. Camouflage saw. I wonder what could cause that. Could an unlucky combination of ground faults through corrosion and electrolyte deposits do the trick? And could it reach that point without triggering a ground fault code and locking out?

I guess in Mr. Camouflage's case we don't have the history of what the previous owner noticed (or perhaps ignored) leading up to that event. Will have to pull out my manual to remember whether the ground fault codes still allow driving or cause a lockout.

Or is it possible that, even while sitting locked out and unused, the condition could have progressed anyway to the failure seen?

-Chap

 

Not getting connections tight when putting things back together, causing high resistance => Ohmic heating => magic smoke.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

IIABDFI is a good general rule, which people usually don't depart from except when there's a known risk of the slow insidious type with a catastrophic failure mode. The kinds of preventive practices seen in medicine or industry are used where some such risk is known, and judged to be worth departing from IIABDFI.

So, I guess I wasn't wondering whether "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good rule in general. I was wondering what might be causing the small number of battery fires that have been reported on this forum, and whether there might be any early detection/prevention possible, short of waiting for a nice car to burn up. I guess the sort of response I'd hoped for would involve ideas as to how that condition developed, and whether it could be detectable early by any cover-off inspection of the battery.

In Mr. Camouflage's case, of course, we know very little about what happened leading up to the fire itself. The event itself he seemed to think was an arc, and from the pictures that does look more likely to me than ohmic heating at a terminal.

Because the battery is series-wired, I don't easily see how at any terminal a sufficiently high contact resistance could exist to create that amount of heat without also being detected by the battery ECU as an abnormal series resistance. Am I missing something obvious?

-Chap

 

The battery ECU may spot loose bus bars, but it won't spot a problem with SMR connections. A loose connection at the SMR will melt it and the frame wire. It would look pretty much just like what happened to the Australian guy's Gen 1.