ESS Charging Battery after Mopar lift at dealer

[Delhux]

I had the Mopar 2” lift installed at a local dealership last week.

I dropped it off Thursday morning and they quoted 1-2 days, but due to some sort of delay it wasn’t ready until Monday morning.

I noticed the engine start/stop wasn’t triggering at stop lights and pulled up the status in the dashboard—“ESS unavailable - battery charging”.

I assumed the truck had just sat too long and needed some run time to recharge the secondary battery. I do have a hardwired dash cam that runs in parking mode and can certainly pull some charge from the battery—but has a cutoff around 12.5v.

I have driven about 50-miles since picking it up and it is still in “charging mode”. While driving, the off-road pages screen shows the battery at 14v+, when parked it settles around 12.7v.

How much driving should I do before taking it back to the dealership to address?

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[cecaa850]

I'd give it a couple days of driving.

 

[Delhux]

I'd give it a couple days of driving.

I think I’ll do that, maybe try putting a jump pack on the main battery if it is the same after a couple of days.

I’m assuming with the way they are wired, it would pass the charge to the ESS—anyone know for sure if that is the case?

 

[Delhux]

So, I’ve been driving the truck for about 6-weeks and the ESS battery still is an issue.

In fact, ESS was always “charging battery” for about 3-weeks of my usual driving (20-minute commute twice a day at minimum).

The first time it enabled ESS was after 2+ hours of straight highway driving and then only worked for that trip, that one day—the next day it was back to “charging”.

So I hooked it up to a little 1-amp trickle charger. I left that on (the first time) for about 48-hours. The ESS worked immediately and stayed working for about 5-days of my normal daily driving, then back to “always charging”.

About a week later, I was able to leave the trickle charger connected for just about 80-hours straight. The ESS worked for about a week and a half of normal driving.

Now, the battery tends to show as “charging” without ESS available, but ESS might kick on halfway through my evening commute.

I’m trying to decide if I should go ahead and stick the trickle charger back on for another 80+ hours or not.

I’m still waiting on @JeepCares to provide an update on my steering gear, and might just see what happens with the battery and maybe just have the dealership address that issue at the same time the steering gear TSB parts arrive.

I just can’t imagine how a Mopar lift kit install could have kicked off this battery symptom.

 

[Deadeye]

There have been a lot of bad batteries coming from the factory in Mexico lately. My ESS battery has been replaced twice now and the other one once. Be working great since they replaced both at once. We will see if it lasts longer than 3 months this round.

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