So this is nice, I drive over to my friends house and smell the burning smell again. I pull into his garage and pop my hood, look at the alternator and notice that the pretty red varnished windings inside alternator are now black, the smell must be the varnish burning off. What is going on? Did I get a bad alternator or is something else chasing this to happen...

 

So my friend and I took it back to O'reilly. I asked for another and they gave me one, I made them test it and it failed also lol. So we went to another O'reilly where they had one nearby and that one passed the bench test. Anyways, everything seems to be ok now, I heard kind of a whining noise on the old one but I don't hear it on this one.

Car is running ok, but I just want to make sure, this was probably the alternator right? Just don't want this to happen again if something else is causing them to burn up. The other one ran for a couple days before I could smell anything bad, so want to avoid this if there is another problem.

In case you're interested, this is what the other one looked like when we pulled it out today lol:

 

Your battery may have a shorted cell. The alternator will be overloaded trying to charge a shorted battery. A good charged battery has a voltage of about 12.6 with the car off. If the voltage is instead around 10.5, the battery is bad.

 

Yeah I was thinking about that on the way home, but the battery is around 12.6 volts, measured it earlier, I'm just watching everything to be sure. Alternator is a little low right now, around 13.7 volts, but it could be charging up the battery still since it drained some when my alternator went out the other day.

I could have O'reilly test my battery just to be sure, but I don't hear the weird noise I heard with the other alternator anymore.

 

So I'm back again, two months later and the alternator has failed again. Didn't burn up this time, just stopped charing the battery. Had the battery check, perfectly fine, no problems there. Car doesn't appear to be drawing any significant current whenever the car is off. I pulled the alternator out, took it in, and it failed right away no big surprise there.

So anyways, I read that this is pretty common with rebuilt alternators, so I want to get a brand new one. Can anyone recommend any good reliable brands that aren't too expensive ($200 or less). O'reilly said I could get my money back because they tried to look up the price on a brand new one and it turns out they can't order it (and I hope they mean money back plus the core price).

I found this one:

https://www.starterpros.com/PartDeta...p?IDNum=47468N

Or here, the new one:

http://www.carid.com/1999-honda-civi...r-9420240.html

Any good?

 

To be sure the alternator is faulty,start the engine and take of one of the battery terminals.If the engine stops running or goes off after that,it means the alternator is bad.

 

It's the alternator, I had the alternator itself tested on the bench test at oreilly and it failed immediately. Taking off the battery terminal is not recommended anymore, as it can actually cause damage to electrical system, it's possible you could get large spikes or transients that won't be supressed if the battery is diconnected. Just looking for a recommendation on new alternators.

 

You could consider a junkyard one and put a new set of brushes in it. The Mitsubishi alternators have been known to last the life of the car-- unless you get into a string of lemon ones that keep going back and forth to the chain parts store.

 

What's the problem with buying one new if it costs me the same pretty much?

 

Any suggestions? I need to get my car running again so I need some recomendations.