Ok, my 91 accord ex, 4 cyl auto. with 290k + miles slowly dies while I'm driving. I've had 2 distinct instances where this has occoured.

The 1st time it happened was after I was trying to jump start a friend's car at work and it wouldn't even jump her car off. I had to get a jump from her after she went in the parts store to buy a new battery because mine went dead. As I drove home, the car started bucking as if it were running out of gas. Also, the gauges were going haywire and stopped working altogether. Neither the CEL nor the battery light came on and the alternator belt was still in tact. I tried to jump it off, verifying my jumper cable connections were right and tight and the car would not take a jump. After several attempts it stared on the last jump no problem. I got it home, ensured the battery terminals were cleaned and tight, pulled out my voltmeter and the battery had 12v, started it and it jumped to about 13.5v. I also cleaned the terminal and verified a good connection at the cable coming from the alternator going to the underhood fuse block and ohmed it out as well.

After perfoming the steps above, I started the car and drove it for about 35-40 miles and as i was driving, I kept noticing the instrument cluster light going from bright to dim with about the same frequency as turn signals, but maybe a little slower. When I came to a stop, the cluster light malfunction seemed to stop or was not as pronounced as it was while I was driving. However, the car has not died as it did before for around 2 months now, but the dash still flickers from time to time.

Today my car did it for the 2nd time after driving approx. 80 miles with the same synptoms described earlier. No CEL, no battery light, gauges jumping up and down then quitting. Next the car starts bucking. Got it home, wouldn't restart. Put it on my battery charger for about 7 min. and started up fine and every time after that. It's been 3 hours since I charged it last and I've started it about 3-4 times since then no problem. I started it just now and it fires up like a champ.

ELD?

 

Problem has appearance of low voltage, worn battery, alternator not charging correclty. Suggest getting a Battery Monitor (Equus 3721 or similar from amazon, walmart, etc) to monitor the battery voltage from the cigarette lighter plug. This will show if battery voltage is low during operation; alternator not charging enough.

I have also seen worn harmonic balancer/crankshaft pulley cause similar problem. The outer pulley separates from the rubber bushing allowing pulley to slip, reducing battery charging and causing battery to die. This will happen w/o alt light going off for some reason.

good luck

 

I replaced the alternator because the old one failed the test at AutoZone plus had a bad bearing. I was wondering if the bearing caused some internal damage without activating my battery light on my dash?

Thanks for the info. TexasHonda,

Hondalover

 

Never go by lights or gauges, well at lease try 2 avoid them when troublshooting. Especially electrical. Glad you got it fixed. It deff sounded like alt going bad.

 

The Alt light apparently only works when the Alt quit charging completely. When it's putting out low voltage, it may be enough to keep Alt light even though the battery is steadily declining (discharging). This goes against how I understood the Alt light works, but I've seen too many cases of bad charging system w/o Alt light illuminated.

good luck

 

A couple weeks ago I was diagnosing idle issues. I decided to change out my alternator at autozone, thinking that maybe there was a problem with the eld circuit. I did this even though I didn't test anything beforehand to confirm this.

I had them test my oem denso. It tested fine but I wanted to replace it anyhow, even though I tested it myself and it worked perfectly. Then I had em test the one they were selling me. It tested fine. I bought it anyhow and installed it.

It worked fine for one day. The second day the light started coming on when I would slow to a stop and when there were no loads on the car.

What appears to be happening was when the eld low output mode was on, no loads, 15-50 mph, car warmed up, and the ecu was signaling low output mode, the alternator was putting out too low of a charge(prolly < 12.25 volts, by my estimation, since I couldn't really test it since I have a MT and don't have a cigarette lighter voltage tester at the moment), which caused the light to come on. When I started testing it with loads I noticed it was actually putting out less of a charge than the day before when I tested it myself after just putting it in.

I took it back and they tested it again and said it passed, but I got another one and when I put this one in and tested it, it's actually putting out more voltage than the first one, about as much as the one I originally had in the car. The voltage light now doesn't come on and everything is fine.

The funny thing is the first one they gave me didn't light up the warning light with loads on, since the ecu wouldn't signal low output mode, but as soon as I turned all loads off it would light up. lol Kinda opposite what you would expect.

Later on I backprobed and tested everything in the alternator eld connector circuits and my system works likes it should.