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[JasonH]

What's really important with car batteries is how long they've been sitting on the shelf. You really need one that has been there less than 6 months. Buy from somewhere with fast moving stock.

I've had some duff (stale) decent brand batteries over the years. I bought a battery for a friend from Vx on Trade Club and it wouldn't start his car. I went back to the Main Dealer with a digital voltmeter to get a decent replacement. After they had bought a few out, all flat, they let me go out back. They had a pallet of dusty and duff new batteries!

I bought I nice Bosch S5 from Costco and that was always iffy. In the end, after 3.5 years it started to fail badly. Fortunately Costco batteries have a 5 year warranty, so I took it back and to my surprise got a full cash refund. I went to the battery section and challenged the chap there to give me a fresh battery. He pointed at some "delivered last week", bought one - it's great even though it's a lower Ah than the one I brought back.

Bosch and I think someone else just re-badge the Varta batteries. Varta car batteries are quite "high end" these days; there's a lot of cheaper nastier stuff out there.

[chrisgixer]

No mention of Yuasa yet then? ....them or Gm for me. I've seen too many failures of everything else, from Bosch to Halfords, to consider much else. Don't get me wrong I'm sure every manufacturer has failures, but some names keep coming up.

As you mentioned earlier there's two lines of thinking on here re parts. Imo if your omega is a longtermer, and most are on here, it's worth investing in decent parts. But getting them at the cheapest price is the key

Let's face it, we've all been looking for an omega replacememt. There's been sooo many threads on what to replace it with and we've come up with nothing. We're going to be omega'ing for some time yet. So it seems to me it's best to fit something that won't give agro down the line, where possible.

[chrisgixer]

Oh, and when I mention gm, that does not include the GO batteries they where peddling a while back.

...and while a long warranty is better than a short warranty, that won't help when your stranded Middle off nowhere with a dead car.

[05omegav6]

So perhaps the best approach would be to buy to a budget and treat as a service item, replacing every November 

[Broomies Mate]

Oh, and when I mention gm, that does not include the GO batteries they where peddling a while back.

...and while a long warranty is better than a short warranty, that won't help when your stranded Middle off nowhere with a dead car.

No - But the saving on an 'expensive' battery could be well spent on a cheap booster pack to keep in the boot.

Then return the 'faulty' battery to the counter and get a new one FOC???

[chrisgixer]

So perhaps the best approach would be to buy to a budget and treat as a service item, replacing every November 

Possibly. But then that's a third approach.

[05omegav6]

 

[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

What's really important with car batteries is how long they've been sitting on the shelf. You really need one that has been there less than 6 months. Buy from somewhere with fast moving stock.

I've had some duff (stale) decent brand batteries over the years. I bought a battery for a friend from Vx on Trade Club and it wouldn't start his car. I went back to the Main Dealer with a digital voltmeter to get a decent replacement. After they had bought a few out, all flat, they let me go out back. They had a pallet of dusty and duff new batteries!

I bought I nice Bosch S5 from Costco and that was always iffy. In the end, after 3.5 years it started to fail badly. Fortunately Costco batteries have a 5 year warranty, so I took it back and to my surprise got a full cash refund. I went to the battery section and challenged the chap there to give me a fresh battery. He pointed at some "delivered last week", bought one - it's great even though it's a lower Ah than the one I brought back.

Bosch and I think someone else just re-badge the Varta batteries. Varta car batteries are quite "high end" these days; there's a lot of cheaper nastier stuff out there.

I couldn't find any sort of date stamp on my old GM battery. I did check.

[chrisgixer]

Oh, and when I mention gm, that does not include the GO batteries they where peddling a while back.

...and while a long warranty is better than a short warranty, that won't help when your stranded Middle off nowhere with a dead car.

No - But the saving on an 'expensive' battery could be well spent on a cheap booster pack to keep in the boot.

Then return the 'faulty' battery to the counter and get a new one FOC???

Like I said, best parts at the cheapest price. But first you need to Id the best parts. Hence this thread.

And it depends how the battery fails. I've had one turn off like a switch. Luckily outside Halfords door as it happened. It failed open circuit. No booster pack will fix that.

[chrisgixer]

So what battery is so cheap it only lasts a year? Or warrants changing every year? Or wouldn't be THE most expensive way of going about things?

[chrisgixer]

Just checking that getting a battery on Trade Club is still the best / most cost effective batteries. I know they've recently introduced some Trade Club battery, or something, no more Go batteries?

Thinking of getting the Diesel type battery, or is that just a fair whack of extra cash for not a lot of real-world benefit?

...and the diesel omega batteries won't physically fit. I tried.

So big the engine is in the way.

[05omegav6]

So what battery is so cheap it only lasts a year? Or warrants changing every year? Or wouldn't be THE most expensive way of going about things?

I was thinking along the lines of preventative maintenance rather than getting stuck out of the blue... for the sake of a quid a week

[Nick W]

So perhaps the best approach would be to buy to a budget and treat as a service item, replacing every November 

Batteries are, and always have been, a service item. But you can't say how long they're going to last, as some seem to go on forever. I see a lot of suddenly faulty batteries at this time of year(and again in the spring!), some of which were original on 13 year-old cars. Others are little more than 3 years old, which seems to me to be the acceptable cut-off. Personally, I would buy a midpriced battery for a daily used car, and insist on the best you could afford for a rarely used one.

Mine is a Bosch S3, bought from ECP for £53 2 years ago when the one fitted wouldn't start the car one Saturday morning. The cheaper one they offered was only about £5 less and was a brand I'd not heard of. Not a worthwhile saving.

[Kevin Wood]

..and by the time we have any experience of a decent battery (by which I mean one that will last 6 or 7 years or more) you can bet that you won't be able to buy the same battery any more anyway and, in the case of GM batteries, they'll have changed their supplier about 3 times by then.

For example, I bought a Yuasa professional 100 battery for my Omega about 18 months ago. It was a good price and turned the engine over a lot quicker than the previous GM one even when it was in good condition. I can't recommend it because it's now discontinued.

[Diamond Black Geezer]

Hmmmm... which is where the brand loyalty can be a positive. If a company makes consistently good products, then, for years, we can faithfully buy things, knowing them to be good. Sadly, people don't tend to have brand loyalty, and the companies have realised this. Make a reputation, then start churning out the cheap rubbish. Kettles are a good example. No matter what kettle we buy, a Tesco special, which looks like it'll last a week is chugging along nicely after 3 years, its predecessor swanky Morphy Richards 'considerably richer than yow' went pop after a year 

Of course was it people didn't have brand loyalty, so then the companies realised there's no harm is cutting the quality, because they're not going to buy your model anyway... or was it the companies started cutting back on quality, so people stopped buying from them? Chicken and egg, I suppose.

I like the advice about buying fast moving stock - that makes sense.