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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Traveling the OReGO Trail - Dead Battery & Phantom Trips

This is another entry in my journey with the Oregon vehicle mileage program called OReGO.

As I reported here, I have been having battery issues since signing up for OReGO. I have also been seeing phantom trips show up in the driving log. I joked that that after your battery dies, your car can become haunted.

Well, while not a haunting, it turns out that the phantom trips may actually be related to the battery issues. The OReGO website has a new feature that reports your vehicle's Voltage level. Here is what they show for mine currently:
Battery Voltage Reported on OReGO Website

Just before this feature went online, OReGO support called me and said that my battery Voltage was low and that might be the cause of my phantom trips. They recommended that I drive or idle the vehicle more often to keep the battery charged. Ironic that they would include idling the vehicle as a suggestion since you lose points in their gamification scoring system when you idle.

While, I agree that driving the vehicle more would keep the battery charged, I don't want to drive my gas hog vehicle any more than I need to and I am certainly not going to idle. That is just wasteful. So I did two things, I put a new battery in and put it on a genius battery trickle charger until it was full.

New battery on a charger

However, even after the battery was full, the phantom trips continued to occur. The OReGO site also continues to show that the battery Voltage level is low, even when the charger showed it as full and in the dash Voltage gauge shows ~13V.

So the saga of the dead battery and the midnight phantom on the Oregon trail will continue.




Traveling the OReGO Trail:
July 19, 2015 - Signing Up - Why?
July 23, 2015 - Saddle Up
July 27, 2015 - First Trip
July 29, 2015 - Jumpy GPS
July 31, 2015 - Jumpy GPS Response
August 20, 2015 - The Big Trip (well not that big)
September 25, 2015 - Dead Battery
October 6, 2015 - Dead Battery Response
October 15, 2015 - Phantom Midnight Driver

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