Discussions

Woke up to find my back hatch of my vehicle open and my battery dead. Grateful nothing broken or obviously stolen but irritated about battery being dead. What can I do to get my battery going again. Please teach me so I don’t feel helpless again in the future.

Open was it? It shouldn’t have died because the hatch was open . Now that it’s getting colder you may want to get it tested after you get it boosted .

It was so strange I locked my door heard it make the beep beep woke up to find my back hatch almost like it was forced open or something. My car is one of those where the light stays on if a door is open. I do recall getting a weird notice on my phone in the middle of the night and dismissed it but I guess it was alerting me my door was opened. Kinda of vulgar considering I have a camera system set up. I dunno.just strange. I don’t see anything in particular on my security system, just a light coming on briefly. I’ll go through it again. I noticed another thread discussing rummaging of vehicles maybe related?

A Jump start should do the trick. Make sure you let the car run for at lease 10-15 minutes after starting it (charging the battery), without running any accessories. Maybe even a bit longer. Hopefully you have a friend with cables. For the future, you really should consider in investing in a pair, if you don't have already. In our climate, everyone should have them.

You need to put an actual battery charger on it to get a full charge back into the battery. If you just let the alternator charge up the battery, it will be adequate to get the car started for a while, but will never get back up to a full charge. Not charging the battery fully will actually shorten the life of your battery, and it could fail in really cold weather. Which is the worst time to fail, IMHO.