3-Hour Battery change

You’ve been offered sage advice on swapping out -/+ battery cables as something that should have been done @ years at year 10.

Your CanBus operates on 5v. Any resistance in the arteries from the heart will trigger a gremlin, waste your time and peak your frustration. Start with new wires because you should spend time with bride, not chasing false codes.

As a purely preventative measure will go ahead and look into getting some new ones.
Hard to argue with your logic.

I assume this large positive cable with inline fuse is the primary culprit. There's also another that goes from it to the alternator for charging, plus the negative post to engine block cable. Are all of these problem prone, or mainly the pictured one?

Appreciate the advice!

It could be. The load, engine bay heat, jump starts and using every single electrically driven component in a storm at night overdraws the rated load on the cables.

That causes oxidation to accumulate internally. From that point it’s like a kink in a hose. One minute it’s fine, go over a bump, get a free random DTC. The gremlins get worse in cold weather.

The same issue occurs to owners who purchase the cheap, made overseas replacement z55/z95 Auto / MagRide struts.

They’ll blame the truck for all the issues they create and forgot the OEM struts took the truck close to 100k without issues.

Connecting the positive cable last instead of the negative cable can short out modules. When a car is first started after a battery change, it's best to drive it around for a bit to allow the computers to adjust from being cut off and for the battery to become fully charged.

My wife jumped our truck with some ratty cables from a passerby and shorted out the RR wheel speed sensor somehow. The RCDLR has been acting wonky ever since as well, hope I don't have to change that out but do have spares and ability to program if needs be.

My lesson, I knew the battery was nearing end of life and kept kicking the can down the road, trying to get to 48 months. It went 43 and I should not have put her in that position to deal with it. That's my job.

@KC 2013 Tahoe You mentioned using Mobile One oil. Have you done an oil analysis after using it?

petethepug said:

Negative energy released from the truck to allow positive vibes to flow back in?

Click to expand...

swathdiver said:

Connecting the positive cable last instead of the negative cable can short out modules.

Click to expand...

Never knew! Glad I always do negative last!

I always worry if I hook up the negative cable first,
the positive terminal might drop and contact ground somewhere..

skimmed thru thru the thread.. just for anyone else. if you have the battery cables off to replace the the battery. before connecting everything back up. touch and hold the pos and neg cables together for about 30sec. this will discharge the systems in the truck and trigger a reset of the hvac blend doors. this info is buried in long threads on this site about flashing ac button lights.


if you have a good scanner you can also hit the blend door reset button instead.

I do agree that plastic gears inside hard to reach hvac doors is annoying. it's like that on all cars days thou.

how the original poster has broken all kinda of interior and exterior parts like door pulls and stuff I don't know. don't see threads about that commonly. if ever and none of mine have broken at 165k of use. I have a buddy we jokingly call the product testers because he's 6' 6" 350lbs, is like a bull in a China closet. Just no finesse, breaks everything he touches lol. dude goes ******* the daily.

I will add one more thing that's worked both on my GM trucks and my Jeeps. In fact, I just did it again with one of the Jeeps.

BLUF: leave the battery disconnected for AT LEAST 30 minutes.

Just had some work done on my wife's 2016. Rodent damage to wiring. Get it back from the shop, and the tech had disconnected the tap I use for the headlight halos and Christmas wreath. I'd forgotten how I'd hooked it up, pulled the wrong fuse, and now the TPMS wasn't reading any tire values. 4 dashes instead of pressure readings.

Disconnected battery for 10 minutes.... reconnect.... nothing changed.

Tried a few different things, no change. I just really didn't want to take it back to the shop. "Hail Mary" move was disconnecting the battery for like an hour. Reconnect and all is well.

Again, this has also worked on my GM trucks. I don't know why, but it's worked several times. YMMV.

ETA: Jeep with lighted Christmas wreath..