From the job book
What this work looks like
Real repairs, photographed on the job. These are jobs from our wider mechanic network rather than Milwaukee customers — we say so on every page rather than implying otherwise.
Two things kill a battery here, and they pull in opposite directions. Summer heat cooks the electrolyte and quietly destroys capacity you do not notice while it is warm. Then the first genuinely cold morning arrives, chemical reaction slows down, available cranking amps drop by around a third at zero degrees, engine oil thickens and the starter needs more current than it did in August. The battery that was fine on Sunday is dead in a driveway in Sherman Park on Monday.
That is why a battery almost never fails in the cold snap that gets blamed for it. It failed the previous July. February just presented the bill.
Plenty of people get sold a battery when the battery was fine. The charging system, the starter, the main grounds and the parasitic draw from a module that will not go to sleep all produce the same symptom, and the last two are extremely common on a car that has spent years in road salt.
So we test. Resting voltage tells you state of charge. A load or conductance test tells you the battery's actual health. Voltage while cranking tells you whether the starter is dragging. Voltage with the engine running tells you whether the alternator is keeping up - and a reading in the low thirteens instead of the mid fourteens is an alternator on the way out, not a healthy one. If a parasitic draw is suspected we will put an ammeter in line and find the circuit rather than sell you a battery every eighteen months.
A starter is a cheap part attached to expensive labor. On some engines it is three bolts and forty minutes. On plenty of modern transverse V6s it lives under the intake manifold, and getting a hand and a socket onto it is most of the job. We quote your engine rather than an average, and we tell you the number before we start turning bolts.
Alternators are usually kinder, but the belt, the tensioner and the pulley are all worth checking while the covers are off. A charging fault is occasionally just a slipping belt, and finding that out for the price of a diagnostic is a good afternoon.
Real repairs, photographed on the job. These are jobs from our wider mechanic network rather than Milwaukee customers — we say so on every page rather than implying otherwise.
$79 flat call-out, diagnostic included, 7 days a week, 7am - 7pm. If you decline the repair that is the whole bill.