Okay, I have this buzzing sound in my speakers when my car is running, and as usual when I rev the motor the buzzing gets louder and more of a steady tone. I thought I had a bad ground for my amp, or the power cable was too close to the speaker cables; BUT, it's not coming from my subs, it's from the door speakers and rear speakers. So I'm like, WTF?? Tonight I'm leaving my house for work and my car won't start, dead battery, which is odd because I have seen no signs of this until that one moment tonight. I used my coleman to jump it, and came to work (Radar Detector and Head Unit lost power for like 4 seconds coming down 60, then both came back on), stopped at a gas station, go to start car, DEAD BATTERY, WTF, I thought it would have charged a bit on the way to work, but no. Anyway, can these problems be related? I've never encountered this before!!

 

Have you had your alternator tested?

 

No, but I WAS hoping is could be something cheaper than that!

 

An overworked alternator, either because it is dying, or because the system demand is too high, can cause noise.

It might not be the alternator, yet. Your battery could have an internal short or near short. It might show 12+volts sitting there, but try and start it, and it will go to less than 11. This would cause an alternator to suddenly become overworked. I say it isn't bad 'yet' because if you keep trying to charge this battery, it will be.

Jumpstarting a car should be avoided at all costs. When you do this, you then ask your alternator to charge a dead battery. That's not what its designed to do, and will shorten its life. This is a big problem with people who don't drive their cars. I usually hear 'how can the alternator be bad, the car only has 10k miles on it?'. Then you find out that everytime they go to drive the car, it is dead, and they jumpstart it. Give them a trickle charger, and the problem goes away.

I realize that sometimes you'll have no choice, but its not a good thing.

 

Take it by Advanced Autoparts. They supposedly test this for free.

 

if the car was running while you were driving and didnt stall out it could simply be the battery will no longer hold a charge.

 

I bought a new battery, removed some shitty looking ground wires; now everything is back to normal. New battery seems to be holding what it's got but I'm still going to get a new alternator when I get paid, I don't know how old that thing is anyway.

 

if you dissasemble the alternator, clean the bearing and tighten the coil loads you can basicly use the same alternator forever. Thats what the auto parts stores do when you give them your core anyways.

might be good to save the $ and research rebuilding your esisting alternator. it isnt difficult.

 

Hey, thanks for the info. Rep for ya!!

 

Yea that sound usually comes from a bad ground but also the battery and or alternator can do it too as you have found out. If I were you I would have invested in a dry cell battery. Those things a great! Seriously though, have your alternator tested at Autozone and I'll bet more than anything that its still perfectly fine. Waste that money on a 1 farad cap or something like that depending on what type of power your system is pulling.