I am currently on Cherie Priest‘s couch. My car is at a garage. Eric O. drove me down the hill from Leslie’s and we tried jumpstarting the car, though I was fairly sure that it wasn’t a battery issue, just to make sure we’d tried everything.
It wasn’t the battery.
After we returned to Leslie’s I began trying to find a shop that was a) open and b) would work on a Mercedes this old. I had the car towed to a shop and the Leslie dropped me off at Cherie’s to hang out. The plan was that if the car is ready this evening, I’d ask Cherie to drop me off at the garage. If they couldn’t get to it until Monday, I’d ask her to drop me at the train station at 5pm. If it would be ready tomorrow, I’d ask if I could stay over.
I’m staying over.
The verdict with the car is that the diesel gelled during the snowpocalypse and that water got into the tank and things froze. Tomorrow they’ll make it drivable, largely by heating the thing up.
While I miss Rob, there are many worse ways to await car repairs than spending the day hanging out with Cherie.
It’s good to have friends in far-flung places, isn’t it? My envy at having Cherie Priest for a friend is boundless.
When you described your car’s symptoms yesterday I thought it sounded like a lack of fuel rather than a battery issue. With the unusual weather around Seattle I wondered if it was a frozen fuel line (we see that a lot here in upstate NY) but I didn’t know if the typical solution (a bottle of dry-gas) would help a diesel.
A bit of advice that you’ll probably never need but you can dish out to the younger generation when the time comes: in winter weather keeping your fuel tank full reduces condensation, which is a big cause of water in the tank.
Thanks! The tow truck driver also mentioned the trick about topping off the car’s fuel tank on nights when it’s going to get cold. It’s nice to have confirmation that this works. Hopefully, I’ll be on my way home this afternoon.
In my experience it needs to be subzero (fahrenheit) for deisel to gel. I’ve personally seen it happen once here in Michigan. Good luck with all of your adventures. I’m glad you have a sense of humor about it!
It apparently dropped down to 19 degrees fahrenheit. The problem, I gather, relates to condensation in the tank which freezes.