{"id":71,"date":"2026-06-10T19:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T19:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/2026\/06\/10\/cold-mornings-and-flat-batteries\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T19:15:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T19:15:09","slug":"cold-mornings-and-flat-batteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/cold-mornings-and-flat-batteries\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold mornings and flat batteries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A lead-acid battery loses roughly a third of its cranking power at freezing point, and a cold engine needs more of it. That is the whole story behind the first frost of the year taking half the street with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A battery that has been quietly weak all autumn still starts a warm engine on a mild morning. It has no margin left for a cold one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Short trips are the real killer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fifteen minutes of city driving with lights, heated seats and a rear screen on does not replace what starting the car took out. Repeat that for a few weeks and the battery is never fully charged, which shortens its life as well as its reserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We test batteries under load, not just at rest \u2014 a resting voltage of 12.4 V tells you almost nothing. The test takes two minutes and we do it free with any winter check.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most batteries do not fail in January. They fail in October and get away with it until the first genuinely cold night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":65,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seasonal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.quartier.anpsthemes.com\/torque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}