Dead Battery.... Again

Judy and I left Poche’s Fish and Camp RV Park in Breaux Bridge, LA yesterday morning AFTER dealing with my dead van battery.

I have a Battery Brain installed. It’s supposed to shut off the battery before it dies. I was perplexed when I found that my battery was dead, to say the least. I had this device installed last summer and I had a lot of trouble with it after it was first installed. I suspected that it was installed backwards. Dan Neeley confirmed that this was true. It was a confused Battery Brain for a while. Dan fixed it when we were in Zion.

A few days before leaving on this trip, the Brain turned off my battery after I had been driving for a half hour, which didn’t make any sense at all. Since I don’t have ANY mechanical know how, I wasn‘t able to troubleshoot the problem. That was the last problem I had with the battery until Friday.

The Battery Brain saved me a couple times on this trip. I usually travel with my lights on during the daytime, as well as nighttime. Since the alarm doesn’t ring when I go out the side doors, I often forget to turn my lights off. I thought this would be a good device to have. Actually, I still think it is.

To further complicate things, I took my van into Dodge a while back, in response to a recall notice. The recall notice stated that the gear shift does not always go into park or slips out of park. I had very little trouble with that until I got it “fixed”. Now it rarely goes into park without me making several attempts. If I get distracted and forget to verify that it’s in park, it will let me turn it off while it’s in reverse, which should NEVER happen. The backup lights will stay on. This is a problem for a number of reasons. Still… the battery should be protected by the Brain.

Judy was going to jump start my battery, but I opened my hood a while before she got her van into position, hoping to snag a helping hand from someone in the RV park. Sure enough, just as we were trying to do this “man’s work” along came two couples in golf carts who offered to help. They hooked up Judy’s cables and she fired up her engine. When we checked after a few minutes, my engine still wouldn’t turn over. LUCKILY, one of the men noticed that some wires were loose. I had some handy dandy tools and he tightened up the bolts holding the wires in place. After that, the engine started right up. This explains the Brain’s inability to do it’s job and the previous incident when the battery failed at an unexplainable time. The battery couldn’t charge without it’s lifeline and the Battery Brain couldn’t operate either. I was very lucky that this happened when we were in civilization and that I didn’t have to have the battery evaluated by some greedy automotive person who probably would have taken the opportunity to sell me a new battery, if not more.

This put a damper on our plan to go into town to eat breakfast and listen to zydeco music at a small cafe called Café des Amis. We had been hoping to leave by 8 a.m., but we actually left about 9:30. However, we were both able to get out of the campground completely, which is almost a record breaker for us. Our original plan was to return to the campground to close up shop after going into town in Judy’s Roadtrek.