Neighbours B and S had planned to go into town today, so they brought me along to get the correct solenoid from O’Reilly’s.

Before that, B and L gave me their opinion about what the deep discharge did to the battery. It coincides with what Barre has to say, that an occasional deep discharge like this won’t do much to affect the battery life of true deep cycle 6V golf cart batteries so long as I get it charged up again.

So my batteries are likely okay. I know there are folks out there who would never let their batteries get below 80% who are going to chime in on that and that’s fine, but I doubt I’ll have anything to say in response.

The guys pulled the old solenoid and, in reply to NW-Bound’s comment, it was fried!!! It wouldn’t click and there was tons of resistance. It had tested fine at installation (clicked and no resistance). Also in reply to NW-Bound’s comment, there was no valid number on the old part to cross-check and the old part used to work properly; it would charge my batteries when I as driving and not drain them overnight.

The weekday manager wasn’t on duty at O’Reilly’s, but the weekend manager was. I explained everything to him and he did a search for a continuous duty model, but was unable to find one. He called NAPA while a clerk called Autozone. The latter was useless, but NAPA gave another number to cross-check and that turned up the correct part in stock.

The continuous duty solenoid was $60, four times the cost of the starting model. They did right by me and did a straight up exchange. So I’d go to O’Reilly’s again, but I’d use my cell phone to cross-check a part number instead of relying on the clerk. The continuous duty model actually had a piece of paper in it explaining that it’s for a dual battery system. The starting one had no documentation, not even a part name.

L, B, and I did a lot of research this morning trying to figure out why the house battery drained over night (or, rather, why the two banks paralleled themselves and equalized to comparable voltage). If the same thing happens tonight with the correct part in, then we’ll know there’s something else going on that was being corrected by the old solenoid going bad.

L and B are both engineers and long-time RVErs so I’m in good hands here and can trust that they understand how the part is supposed to work and that they will help me figure this out.

The expression leave well enough alone is making me feel rather bitter today. *wry grin*