BTW,
I got the battery at one of the battery speciality stores here in town. Not crappy Tire. Although, the hassle I had when my last battery went makes me think I should just go to crappy tire, they don't argue much when you return stuff.

 

Now I'm going to take some flack for this, but it is the way things work. Going back to the 70's, Ford cars charged at 14.3 and the rest charged at 13.7 or 13.8. All of the battery cases on the fords rusted out bad.

When running stop and go and normal around town stuff and commuting a few miles, the higher voltage is an advantage. Vehicles designed for this use, including our trucks, charge at like 14.5 or so. This charges the battery faster at a certain shorter life of the battery. If you do a lot of road driving, this is too high. On a long vacation it used to be normal to leave the lights on mostly to keep the battery from overcharging.

I had this problem with mine, ran battery acid down both fenders from the constant freeway driving for hours on end. Constantly went through batteries. Big trucks, designed for the road, charge at lower voltages, like 13.8 or so. When my regulator function on the PCM went out, I tried a few regulators until I found one that charged at 14.0 volts. No more battery problems. In the future if I have problems I will go to an adjustable three wire regulator. I have a couple of them but none working real well. I also found that there is voltage loss through the wiring harness and going through the PCM. I finally added a realy for the +12 regulator voltage with the key on voltage kicking it on. This lowered my voltage a little also and made a more regulated system.

Another thing you can do is go to the Optima battery which accepts a charge rate of up to 15 volts. With the higher rate, another problem that you will have is burned out bulbs. I used to go through a headlight bulb about every two months, no more problem with the lower rate. My marker lights do not burn out any more either.

These trucks are not designed for constant high mileage driving with no stops to absorb the over charging. One day I will change out to a larger heavier system that is designed for my use.

You do need to go to a commercial type battery instead of a car battery. Those 1000 CCA batteries are generally short lived.

 

When i bought mine one of the previous batteries tipped so i decided to upgrade to optimas, one for the engine and one for the toys or both for the engine if i really need it since one redtop is a little shy of the stock cca.