Hi everybody, I am new to this forum although I am a member of the Avengerforumz check me out on there sometime same user name. Anyways so this is the story an older lady that my wife works with bought a 2005 sebring for her daughter. its a 3.0L. I dont know lots about cars just some things. This ladys husband left her and her 2 daughters a while ago and since then she only lives for her daughters. she doesn't get child support and barely scrapes by. She bought the car so her 17 yr old would have a vehicle. Turns out it doesnt run well so she let her daughter have her honda. This lady is one of the nicest ladies EVER and she walks to work that way her daughter can drive the other car. I dont usually do this kind of thing but I feel like she could use a break. Sooo the car has a lot of miles and is in rough shape. My 1st look was tonight and heres the issue

The car doesn't start. I can turn the power on. It cranks everytime. The altenator is a year old the battery is 2 months old. She has taken it to 2 different shops and they juked her each time. 1st they replaced the terminal wires so they are new. 2nd they replaced the battery. the car bogs out while in idle. I can here a squeal come from the left side by the altenator/ belt area. inside the car the lights dim and the btry warning light flickers on and off and when the radio is on and you turn the air on the radio cuts out. I jumped the car just fine and let it run while depressing the pedal a bit and cut it off and bam wont start. the air filter is fairly new. I still need to check the plugs and stuff but any ideas.

I am going to buy all the parts as long it it doesnt get too costly. it seems like this might be a common issue with these vehicles if they are not maintained properly. Please help and sorry for the long post just thought you should know how bad I need some advise.

 

what are the codes in the computer?

 

Happy turkey day. I am going to take it friday to autozone to get it read.

 

Okay I took it to the zone to see what codes popped up and bam no codes. I knew this was a charging issue so I checked the volts while the car was running and the battery read 9.12v so the car was running off the battery. Then I pulled the altenator and had it tested and it was bad. so heres my guess at what happened. one of the shops only fixed half the issue. if the alt was bad and they only replaced the btry then by doing that they made the new btry go bad quickly. then the other shop said no your btry is okay its your alt and by replacing the alt with a bad btry still it made the alt become inop prematurely. so I charged the btry back to 12.6v and got a new alt and everything is good now. I know not to many people responded to this thread but thank-you to those who did.

 

Glad it was a simple fix in the end.
Just because the alt was replaced, doesn't mean that a good unit was put in.
Geez... how many times have we bought something new & it doesn't work out of the box... maybe not often, but it does happen.