Please help ! My alternator

Hello beautiful community , so couple days ago I went to autozone to just randomly check my alternator nothing wrong with my battery charging, but their tool they were checking with shows that my alternator wasn’t charging the battery, long story short, I bought a used alternator oem and installed it and went back to them to check again and their tool is saying the samething that the alternator is not charging the battery. What should I do? Nothing wrong with my truck running and everything else is good. Anyone else has this issue with them? Should I just ignore it? Thanks
Update I went to Orelly auto part and they tested it out and it passed . So middle finger to autozone

 

Check your battery voltage with a meter while the engine is running, headlights and blower on high, should be 13.2-14.5v.

 

have it checked at a different auto parts store.
If you have the original factory alternator, just
replace the brushes and have it tested.

 

How do you replace brushes ? I don’t even know what that is lol sorry

 

here is a link for the brushes

https://www.toyotapartsdeal.com/oem-2007-toyota-tacoma-alternator_brush.html

here is a video on changing them. This is not a difficult job and keeping your original Toyota Alternator is a good thing.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timmy+the...i=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71_kBhg6_-A

 

With the truck running, what happens when you disconnect the battery?
If the alternator is bad the truck should stop running.
Take the original alternator to another store and get it checked as well.

 

Do not do this on a fuel injected vehicle, it's not a good test but it is a good way to kill electronic modules.

Super simple to check charging voltage with a meter.
You can pick up a multimeter pretty much anywhere and they are cheap.

 

Ok thank you <3

 

I would still take the alternator thats in the truck to another auto parts store to have it tested.

 

AutoZone sells parts.
They do not, and should not, diagnose vehicles.

You likely replaced a part, that didn't need replaced.
And you replace it with a "used" part too......

I mean, you didn't have a problem BEFORE you went to AutoZone.
Why would you now.....

 

lol I know but don’t worry ima keep my original one for spare as well.

 

Interesting.
So what happens if your battery goes bad while you are driving it?

 

Should never happen, there's a very small chance it can happen but you should never let your battery get in that condition.

In addition to storing power to start the truck and to run things with the engine off the battery acts as a filter to counter any voltage spikes, electrical noise, and/or AC ripple all of which are bad for electronics.

You never want to run a vehicle with no battery or a dead battery connected.

Unhooking the battery with the engine running really doesn't tell you much about the health of the alternator anyway, so what if it stays running that only means the alternator can put out enough power to keep the truck running (which most ECMs will stay online until the voltage drops below around 8-10v) but that tells you nothing about it's health or ability to regulate voltage and current.

 

i've got to ask, do you also randomly swing by the hospital as well for a colonoscopy every few days as well?

it's always best to not go looking for trouble if there ain't any!

 

So you would wait until your alternator fails ?

 

absolutely.

the alternator comes in second behind the battery. a weak battery won't allow the vehicle to start, where a weak or failing alternator will give more than enough fair warning to get another 20-30 miles before the battery gets low enough to cause issues.

alternators generally last quite a while. you'll generally go through at least two serpentine belts and two complete sets idler pully's before needing to bother with the alternator. generally, the bearings are the most common failure point in alternators, not the electrical side of them. and the bearings like to start making bad noises as they fail, which leads to a easy way to determine what's failing.

 

Thanks btw my alternator has over 200k miles and still going strong