2001 Chevy Venture Another Replacement Battery Installed

Replacing The Battery - September 23, 2017
Mileage - 212750 Miles

Once again, it appears that it is battery replacement time! See the last time the battery was replaced HERE.   This time, the symptoms were a LITTLE different, as I recall having to put a bit of distilled water in the battery several months ago, when the van had some slow cranking and the battery needed to be charged up. That was after leaving some "toys" connected to power and running overnight.  Luckily I still have my battery charger, and a few hours was all that was needed to charge the battery to a state where it would start the van again.

The symptoms that occurred this time were SLOW cranking - after coming back from a short trip into the grocery store. But the van DID start again and get me home. One relatively new symptom during that trip was that the door locks started "clicking" - locking and unlocking again - until the van was running for about 30 seconds. I assume that the alternator was recharging the battery by then, when the clicking of the locks stopped. Then the van sat overnight when I had to make another short errand trip the next morning. Once again it was slow to crank, had a bit of lock clicking, but I felt confident enough that the van would get me where I had to go - and back.

I DID measure the voltage at the battery that morning, and read about 12.4 volts.That was "good enough" to start the van, and once running I measured 14.5 volts which told me that the system was apparently charging well (alternator working as it should).

Everything was fine until restarting after my errand stops. The van continued to "slow crank", so I knew it was about time to get this thing fixed before I got stranded somewhere. So I sent a text message to my favorite local shop asking if I could come by and have the battery TESTED. The response was "Yes, come by and we can do that. After TESTING, the battery did show to be pretty weak, and needed to be replaced. After checking my records here and at the shop, we both found that this was the same battery that was installed back in 2009. Considering that battery was a "6 year" battery, I feel pretty good that I got about an 8 year service life from that battery.
  Total cost of the job (battery & labor) was about $160-$170