Last night i was driving through a rain storm here in the good ol' Omaha Nebraska, when my Check Gauge light came on. I also noticed my battery gauge went all the way down. Afraid of getting stuck in the middle of a storm I pulled into a parking lot and let it idle for about 5 minutes. It was running okay so I went to Walmart with my lady and told her to not turn the car off or I'd (Jokingly) break her pinkies. I got a new battery and went home to install it. I turned off the car and turned the key to on and the battery was reading out that it still had juice. I installed the new battery and turned the car to on and turns out it had the same power as the old battery. I removed and reinstalled old battery.

The next morning I went to my local O'reilly to have them test my battery and alternator. They were perfectly fine. I then went through and checked every plug I could find to make sure nothing came loose. Everything checked out okay so now I don't know where else to look. Thanks in advance guys!

 

if the gauge is reading fine again my thoughts are a loose connection to the cluster, im not 100% sure which corner of it is the connector (i want to say top left, but im not sure) push on it to see if the gauge comes back if so its just a loose connection.

Also it could have simply been a dirty battery connections to the wires loosing contact, you put them on and off and on again might have tightened them up enough to fix the problem.

for your sake i hope its just a connector under the dash bc i believe the voltmeter is part of the PCM

 

+1

If you were "really" at 0 the truck would have shut down as there wouldn't be enough voltage to run the electrical system. It would be like turing off the key switch. Concitering it was still running I would suggest something got wet or grounded. You cleaned the connections and that might have been all it was like Sharps said.

 

I have ran 20+ miles at street and interstate speeds on only my battery when my alt failed 100%. I turned everything else off to max power to just the plugs. Ran out the battery but didn't leave me stranded.

Optima Blue top.

IndyD

 

Yeah there definitely was a lot of crud on the terminals, I shined everything up real nice and the problem hasn't come back.