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I tend to expect a car battery to last about five years. Maybe a bit more, possibly a bit less. This Monday (31 August 2015) I bought a new car battery. The one it replaced was installed 5 June 2006, so it served for over nine years. I am impressed, and I hope the new one lasts as long.
Sometime this Summer I bought an outdoor rated CFL and replaced one of three incandescents with it. The outdoor lights are used so seldom that it doesn't matter that much, but I was curious about cold weather performance. The last few days have provided enough cold weather that one might think there was a Global Warming demonstration being held in the area.
The light does come one, even at -18 F, though it does so slowly. Instant-on it is not. It seems to do nothing for moment, then the base ends of the tube start glowing, flickering slowly for a bit, before the glow grows through the rest of the tube. Then it's on, but not at full brightness. That takes a few minutes.
The "locker light" motion (passive IR, I suspect, not actual motion sensing) lights with LEDs are work just fine even in this frigid weather. The dollar store alkaline cells don't seem affected by the cold, at least not at the current drawn by the LEDs. It's very nice to not have to fumble around in the dark in this cold to find a keyhole or pushbutton. Putting these lights into place a few months back was a very good idea.
A couple years ago I had some trouble with the battery for the garage door opener remote control and figured it was not just battery age (since I replaced it recently) but cold, so I went and spent a bit on a lithium battery since those were supposed to be long-lived and cold-tolerant. That went dead a couple months ago and it seemed like it had a rather short life for what I had payed for the thing. I replaced it with a dollar store special. It's not even an alkaline, but a carbon-zinc thing. The last few frigid nights (lows have been in the -20 F region the last few nights) it's worked just fine.
I woke to an outdoor temperature of 25 F or so and snow on the ground, at least in the grassy places. Roofs were white with snow, but streets and roads were not. They did have a bit of a glaze of ice on them. The snow was just a bit more than enough to be noticed, with lawns a mix of green and white as the grass poked up through the snow even in the deepest parts.
At Riverssance I ran out of battery for the digital camera on Saturday. I figure I'm apt to do that again at MFF (and elsewhere) and with only the one battery that's not good as recharging takes some time and isn't always convenient. Fortunately the batteries are not very expensive.
I've also gotten used to having backups of data. I might not have needed them (yet) but it's nice to know they are there. When I transfer the pictures from the camera's memory card to the laptop and then wipe the card for space, the pictures are only on the laptop. That's probably good enough, but I'll be more comfortable with a backup. Okkay, that's justification for what comes next, though I will admit to just plain wanting to have a certain something.
The upshot is that yesterday I ordered a second battery for the camera and a 4 GB USB flash stick. I figure 4 GB should be more than adequate for storing a convention's worth of images and that size can now be had for significantly less than $100. I'll probably getting another CompactFlash card for the camera as well.
Yesterday I needed to use battery charger to get the car started. Later I needed to get a jump-start to leave work. If I had been pondering putting things off, that ended any such notions. After a bit of highway driving to hopefully get things charged up for one more start, I went to K-Mart and bought a Diehard battery, which they carry now that they and Sears have merged. The curious bit is that the new battery is labeled as "Maintenance Free" but has filler caps for the cells, or at least it looks like it does.
I pondered changing the battery in the parking lot, but it started raining as I got to the car. There was enough of a charge on the old battery to start one more time and I went home and changed the battery in the shelter of the garage. Naturally, it wasn't raining then. The batteries swapped, I took the old one back to K-Mart and got my 'core charge' (an inducement to keep lead and such out of where it shouldn't be) refunded.
That and a bit of grocery shopping took up a significant chunk of time and I didn't do much else last night. I expect to have a more normal night tonight. And it was nice to get in the car this morning and have the dash lights be bright (the old battery must have been borderline for some time, the brightness of the dash lights surprised me) and have no trouble at all getting the car started.
Every once in a while, when I'd been doing something with the car and had accessories on but did not have the engine running I'd have trouble getting it started. This was a minor concern but as I have a good battery charger and a good drive would get things going right again it wasn't too big a deal.
There was certainly no problem with starting on my RCFM related travels, and the car did sit unused from Thursday night to Tuesday morning. But evidently the lower speed (in town) and shorter trips when I'm home aren't enough to keep things where they should be anymore. I parked the car early Friday afternoon and it sat until this morning.
I got in. I turned the key. The dash lights came on and the fan started. But the lights were dim and the fan was slow. Trying to start, nothing happened. Silence. The battery charger got put to use yet again. Despite being a bit late, I took the longer (and higher speed for longer time) route to work. At worst, I have jumper cables in the trunk. I think tonight will be a longer trip on I-90 to get things nicely charged up. And then I get to go battery shopping. I can probably get by on the current battery for a while, but I'll be better off taking care of it more on my terms than risk waiting for complete failure which is apt to occur at a far more inconvenient time and place.
