What To Do When a Car Battery is Flat Overnight?

What To Do If a Car Battery is Flat Overnight?

Did you start up your car today and it will not start, that is a bit odd? Well that is a symptom that shows it is most likely the car battery has become flat overnight and has no active electrical charge remaining inside it to make the spark plugs burn petrol onto the engine cylinders, to start the car engine. OK so to get your car started up as soon as possible, pop the hood open, remove the car battery and charge it up using a battery charger. Leave the car battery it on charge for a good 8 hours, which is the recommend amount how long you should charge a flat car battery. Then disconnect it from the battery charger, as leaving it connected when the battery charger has charged up the battery can cause the battery to drain its power.

Now that the car battery is fully charged up , don’t insert it back into your car just yet, as you want to troubleshoot, find the problem why the battery is flat and overall to prevent this situation to happen again to your car the next morning you wake up.

Troubleshooting the problem:

Make sure the headlights are turned off, as some people come back late and totally forget that they have left them on, as they are more bothered about get to their bed and going to sleep. If they are turned on, turn them off by finding the car headlight switch, which is located on dashboard and turning the switch to the ‘Off’ setting.

There might me lighting in your car that stays on all night, so to identify if electrical illumination lighting is causing the car battery to be dead, inspect the glove box, trunk, hood and interior lights. This is by looking at all of them when you have shut all the doors in your car and have turned off the engine. If by chance you see any of them lights come on, that is the cause to the problem.  

Make sure the car head unit is also turned off, sometimes a CD inside a CD player, or a cassette inside a tape player may get stuck inside the head unit. This can cause the motor inside it to draw sufficient electrical current from the car battery to make the car battery flat the next morning.

Also make sure that the cigarette lighter socket has metal coins or left over chewing gum wrapper that can get slipped in by holes on the sides of the plastic because this can cause the cigarette lighter socket to thinking that it needs to power something. This is because both the coin and a chewing gum wrapper are made for materials that are conductors.

Besides check the cigarette lighter socket, make sure the interior buttons that control the position of the seats are not jammed or stuck. This can cause the circuit that provides power to the interior button to drain power from the car battery. If you find out this is an issue, remove the outer case and clean the interior button that is jammed or stuck. If cleaning it out doesn’t fix it, then replace it.