Starter Motor in Louisiana

The hot restart is the local failure

Park a hot engine for twenty minutes and the starter, which sits against the block with no airflow, soaks up heat rather than shedding it. Windings at temperature have higher resistance and the solenoid is working against a hot spring.

The tell is specific and easy to miss: it starts perfectly cold in the morning and refuses after a short stop on a hot afternoon. Anyone who only tests it cold will find nothing wrong.

No road salt, and the connections still corrode

Nothing is spread on the roads here, so a starter does not rot from underneath the way a northern one does. It corrodes at its connections instead: the heavy battery cable where it lands on the solenoid stud, the small trigger wire beside it, and the earth strap between engine and body.

Every one of those is a resistance in a circuit carrying hundreds of amps, and a resistance there behaves exactly like a weak starter — slow cranking that gets slower, and a motor that tests fine on a bench. Undo the connections, clean both faces back to bright metal and remake them before condemning the unit.

Extreme humidity and standing-water driving: the underside is wet more often than it is dry.

The climate, in a number

Annual rainfall runs from about 50 inches in the north of the state to around 70 inches in parts of the south-east. A starter draws its heaviest current on the coldest morning of the year, which is the morning it is most likely to be asked twice.

Humidity at the top of the scale

Louisiana is among the most humid states in the country and the cooling season is long. Almost all of the air conditioning compressor's work goes into condensing moisture rather than lowering temperature, which is a duty cycle far beyond what the temperature implies.

The evaporator stays wet, which is where the smell comes from, and the humidity corrodes connectors, grounds and aluminium rather than structure. An electrical fault that behaves differently in the wet is a connector — chasing it to a module is how a cheap repair becomes an expensive one.

What else Louisiana does to a car

The worst road surfaces in the country, over ground that is subsiding and settling underneath them.

What we hold, and what it costs

5 options from Bosch, Cardone, Denso, Remy and Valeo, from $199.99 to $249.99. Prices are firm — where we have no price we publish none.

We are a reseller rather than a manufacturer: we source the part, check it over and sell it, and we confirm it against your year, make, model and engine before it ships rather than asserting a fit on the page. We ship anywhere in Louisiana, including New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Lafayette.