How To Perform a Battery Load Test to Check Battery Condition

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In this video, we're going to show how to load test your battery. The reason you might want to do this is if your battery or your car is sluggish to start in the morning, you hear that the starter is going and it's just not going as fast as it should, or maybe, occasionally you'll have to jump start your car. This is called a load and charging system tester. These are relatively cheap. It's not a bad tool to have in your garage.

Anyway, we're going to do it on this battery here, and you can see it's disconnected. I'm going to apply the positive terminal and then the negative terminal. What this is basically going to do is it's going to draw a load on the battery, and there's a little element in here that gets hot, and after 10 seconds you're going to be able to tell, based upon this gauge here, whether or not your battery is good or if it's got a bad cell in it, or it's just time to change it.

So what I'm going to do is go ahead and press the test button. I'm going to hold it down for about 10 seconds. I'm going to let go, and you can see that it's almost 13 volts. So, this battery is very good. You can feel here the heat from that element inside, and that's drawing the amperage out of the battery. So, now we'll go ahead and disconnect here, and disconnect here, and you see that we've a good battery.

Now, let's go ahead and do it on a battery that we know is bad. All right, we've got another battery here; we're going to repeat the procedure like we did on the other one. Hold down the button. This isn't looking good already. So, you can see that there's basically nothing left of this battery. So, this would obviously need to be replaced. This wouldn't even crank over your car.

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