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Hey All,
As the title implies, I have a 97 Jeep Grand Cherokee. This morning I went out to start my car, heard a single click,and then nothing. I went to try to turn the key again but no sound this time. All electrical power was gone. I tried to jump it off my wife’s but not even a wimper or any indication of electrical. Already late for work, I decided to post-pone testing till this evening.
I swung by Walmart and picked up a 15A charger to connect to my battery. To my interest, the battery had ~12V and 75% charge according to the little machine. I let it charge up to 95% which took less than an hour then attempted to crank my car. This time I was more awake, and noticed that when I got in I had electrical. In fact, I was able to turn the key to ‘on’ etc and hear the fuel pump engage, see odometer, hear the radio etc. When I went to crank it, I again heard a single click and then all power was gone. I connected that little charger and it says my battery has ~2V and 0% charge.
The battery is a Duralast Gold I bought back in 2012 so it’s not old and there is no corrosion or anything of that sort. Can anyone help me understand what’s going on? Obviously a short somewhere that’s zapping all the power…but I’m even more confused because this morning it had nothing adn by the time I came home power magically came back to 75%…… :blink:
Thanks for any help you can offer!
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Hey there,
Its really hard to tell you what is wrong but I can give you some direction hopefully. If battery is fully charged and no shorted cells, there is a possibility for excessive resistance in the battery cables. Make sure no ground wires are broken or filled with corrosion. Also these Chrysler products use a thing called an ASD relay (automatic shutdown relay) that could be and issue in that area as well. It really sounds like a battery issue but post what you find and maybe I can keep you going with some help.
Good luck man!
Thanks for the reply skasten.
After doing some searching and probing, it ended up being a poor ground connection between the ground terminal on the battery and the chassis. I did a resistance test and knew I had an issue when it was ~infinite. As I was disconnecting the negative cable from the battery, one of the portions of the cable ‘slipped out’ from the connector. After tightening everything down she started up no problem! Let’s hope this one really ends up being this easy to fix banana:
I was going to say ‘connection issue’. I’m glad you were able to find it. What you describe are the classic symptoms of a poor electrical connection. Here’s a video on how to find that for future reference.
Additional information here.
http://www.ericthecarguy.com/faq/solving-automotive-no-start-problems
Thanks for the update.
Great job man! Glad I was able to help out a bit. This helps keep my skills up to par lol. Also thanks to Eric for having a wonderful website as well!
Take care.
Jeeps, and in particular Cherokees and grand cherokees are a bit sensitive to sub-optimal battery voltage or subpar ground connections.
A good first step in the situation where you expect an electrical issue, after starting off with a fully charged battery, is to refresh all the ground points in the engine bay, especially those between battery terminal and chassis. Poor connections in these vehicles (and likely others as well)can give a wide range of symptoms, including no starts, loss of power, intermittent loss of gauges, fuel pump issues…the list goes on an on. So a good preventative maintenance thing is to revise and clean those grounds, to get that of the things-to-do list.
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