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Jeep Compass Trailhawk 2019 A stop / start

13K views 12 replies 8 participants last post by  Triangle 351@gmail.com 
#1 ·
Good afternoon everybody, I have a Jeep Compass Trailhawk 2019, I got it from my job from a rental company. My battery died probably cause I didn’t use the car for a long period, after I charged the battery the car started to work but the A stop/start give me an error “stop/start unavailable service stop/start system” I didn’t had any issues before with that... It happens right after I charged the battery with a different car... I know I can take it to the rental company the problem that this place is really far and I wanted to know if there’s an option to fix it without going there ...
 
#2 · (Edited)
I'm going to be honest with you, it doesn't sound like you are up to the challenge of figuring this out yourself, based on your description. You should probably take it to a mechanic.

Feel free to prove me wrong, but I'm guessing you didn't even change the battery yourself because if you had, you would have seen that there is a second battery right next to the primary battery. Both batteries have to be healthy for stop/start to work. Now I have no idea how you could possibly have killed TWO batteries on a 2019 model, aka brand new batteries, but Jeep does use the worst cheapest most horrible batteries of anyone anywhere so I guess I can swallow that horse pill.

My advice would be to get yourself one of these battery chargers: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SQTF1FB/?coliid=I39JC5DEF4YVY6&colid=2CT6G50PA4MJD&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

That particular charger has a screen on it and can double as a bargain-bin voltmeter. What that means is when the charger is not plugged into the wall it can tell you the voltage of your batteries. This saves you from having to buy a voltmeter. Ok, so with that charger you can check your aux (2nd) battery and see if its voltage is at least 10.5 volts. If its much lower than that, you may not be able to save it, but you can try by using that charger. The charger has a pulse-repair mode that can try to desulfate the battery. Might work, might not, depends on what is really wrong with that battery. Then the charger can also do its main function and try to bring that battery to a full charge.

Maybe with a pulse repair and/or a full charge the auxiliary battery will come back to life and stay working. Be aware, the issue may come back later if the battery was not the primary reason for the issues. If the IBS has failed or is faulty then the auxilary battery will never be properly charged and eventually give you problems again. At that point it is probably for sure above your head to fix.

So, to recap, you can try a small inexpensive charger to check the approximate health of the aux battery and charge it up. Thats the cheapest easiest thing you can try on your own. If you still have issues after that, have a parts store put their battery tester on and confirm the aux battery isn't just shot with a bad cell or something. After that, suspect the IBS module at which point you will probably want a mechanic or dealership to work on that. Using the charger may mask/hide the problem, don't be reliant on that, its not normal to have to charge your battery all the time.

One exception to that: If you leave the car parked for long period of time, you should have a battery maintainer on both batteries to keep them topped off. Each battery must have its own maintainer. It must be fully automatic. That one I linked above would probably be OK but I don't know if I would trust it for days and days unattended, maybe go name-brand at that point. These cars have electronics that NEVER shut off, so if you leave the car parked the battery runs down which is bad for the health of the battery and will give you electrical problems even if it starts up. Something like this would be good (two of them): https://www.amazon.com/Schumacher-S...ix=on+board+battery+ma,electronics,175&sr=8-4

If you can't park it near an outlet... absolute last resort would be some kind of solar maintainer. Those are pretty unreliable, mainly because the sun is unreliable, and if you cheap out then they will drain your batteries more than charge them. Again, you have to have one PER EACH battery. The cigarette lighter option will not work because the cigarette lighter port doesn't stay connected to battery (at least, not the front one, and the rear one will only connect to one of the batteries, so just hardwire both).

As you can see, as simple as a 12v battery may be there are two of them here in a complicated system so try to learn about it if you can to head off these issues.

Good luck.
 
#3 ·
Do you live some place where it gets cold, as in -0 F or -20 C.? This week my 2019 Compass was parked for a whole day and overnight at -10F. I used remote start to warm it up and when I got in, the dash was giving me the same message as you had: "stop/start unavailable service stop/start system." Otherwise it ran fine.

I drove 12 miles to church and the light stayed on the whole time. After church the temperature was up to +10F and the light was out and stayed out. Today its warmed up to above freezing and it hasn't happened again.

When it was very cold out 2018 Compass would give me a message to the effect that it was too cold for stop/start to work, but it never said anything about servicing the system.
 
#4 · (Edited)
I occasionally get that warning while using remote start in cold as well (maybe once in every 30 starts). If I immediately turn the car off and restart it, it goes away. It think it is actually related to the software of start/stop system being over picky. After the car starts, the system checks battery charging rate before activating start/stop. I assume cold startup can sometimes cause the battery to not recover before this start/stop checkpoint and cause the system wrongly asses this as a problem with the battery charging.

The reason why I think it works like this is the error goes away if you stop and restart the car. Second start should have a more drained battery (due to the drainage from the first crank), so the error can not be related to the charge level on the battery. The only explanation I can think of is the battery recovery after cranking. Imo the system checks the battery at a sub-optimal time and incorrectly determine it as an issue with charging.

It is more likely to occur with remote start because remote start turns on bunch of things before the car actually starts (like defroster, blower fan, seat heaters, tail lights). These further stress the battery and cause slower recovery after cranking.
 
#5 ·
Tripod said:
I occasionally get that warning while using remote start in cold as well (maybe once in every 30 starts). If I immediately turn the car off and restart it, it goes away. It think it is actually related to the software of start/stop system being over picky. After the car starts, the system checks battery charging rate before activating start/stop. I assume cold startup can sometimes cause the battery to not recover before this start/stop checkpoint and cause the system wrongly asses this as a problem with the battery charging.

The reason why I think it works like this is the error goes away if you stop and restart the car. Second start should have a more drained battery (due to the drainage from the first crank), so the error can not be related to the charge level on the battery. The only explanation I can think of is the battery recovery after cranking. Imo the system checks the battery at a sub-optimal time and incorrectly determine it as an issue with charging.

It is more likely to occur with remote start because remote start turns on bunch of things before the car actually starts (like defroster, blower fan, seat heaters, tail lights). These further stress the battery and cause slower recovery after cranking.
I don't think that is it. There are two batteries here. Both are cheap pieces of crap that suffer from reduced output in cold temps, BUT, even in their cold/reduced performance state the big battery has enough juice to crank the motor over and start stuff up. Even in its cold/reduced performance state, the smaller battery can run some electronics and things with low draw. They are not healthy, either one of them, but they can mostly still do their jobs.

So, the smaller battery suffers more in cold conditions because it has less power and capacity to start with. Its a dinky little motorcycle battery. My lawn mower has a bigger battery than this. So when it gets cold and its performance drops off, it drops off faster and more significantly.

The car gets the signal from your remote to initiate a remote start. Now, it will not run the defrost fan and heated seat/wheel etc while cranking. Give the engineers some credit, they are dumb but not stupid. Anyways, the big battery starts the engine and then the electronics come 100% online and do startup assessments. First thing it finds is that the little battery is cold and low, so it starts charging it up and throws the ESS error because the battery is in too weak a state to do its ESS job. Now this little battery CHARGES the whole time the car is idling and warming up and waiting for you to come out to it. By the time you come out, the battery has charged up significantly (who knows what the charge rate is, but the alternator can output a LOT of amps). The code is stuck for this "drive cycle" that started when the remote start even happened, but now if you hop in and turn it off, and back on, the little battery has been charging for 5-10 minutes and now it will be above the threshold for the ESS error when you restart it.

That is my theory of what/why. It has nothing to do with the large starter battery.

Don't know who is correct, but I could use some beer money if anyone would like to place bets (not like we have any way to prove it anyways) :p
 
#7 ·
I don't think that is it. There are two batteries here. Both are cheap pieces of crap that suffer from reduced output in cold temps, BUT, even in their cold/reduced performance state the big battery has enough juice to crank the motor over and start stuff up. Even in its cold/reduced performance state, the smaller battery can run some electronics and things with low draw. They are not healthy, either one of them, but they can mostly still do their jobs.



So, the smaller battery suffers more in cold conditions because it has less power and capacity to start with. Its a dinky little motorcycle battery. My lawn mower has a bigger battery than this. So when it gets cold and its performance drops off, it drops off faster and more significantly.



The car gets the signal from your remote to initiate a remote start. Now, it will not run the defrost fan and heated seat/wheel etc while cranking. Give the engineers some credit, they are dumb but not stupid. Anyways, the big battery starts the engine and then the electronics come 100% online and do startup assessments. First thing it finds is that the little battery is cold and low, so it starts charging it up and throws the ESS error because the battery is in too weak a state to do its ESS job. Now this little battery CHARGES the whole time the car is idling and warming up and waiting for you to come out to it. By the time you come out, the battery has charged up significantly (who knows what the charge rate is, but the alternator can output a LOT of amps). The code is stuck for this "drive cycle" that started when the remote start even happened, but now if you hop in and turn it off, and back on, the little battery has been charging for 5-10 minutes and now it will be above the threshold for the ESS error when you restart it.



That is my theory of what/why. It has nothing to do with the large starter battery.



Don't know who is correct, but I could use some beer money if anyone would like to place bets (not like we have any way to prove it anyways) :p


The thing is The thing I describe doesn’t happen after 5-10 minutes after remote start. I have a habit of remote starting the car while walking towards it. So it runs for maybe 30 secs before I turn it off and restart. But even after that the error doesn’t repeat, so I don’t think it can be related to the charge on the battery. This is just a theory but I feel like it is related to the order in which system checks components and if there is a delay in charging, it throws an error.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
#8 ·
Could be.

I recently bought a cheap battery analyzer, haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I'm hoping to run some tests and learn more about the overall health of both batteries as they are roughly 3 years old. I am especially curious to see if the system has been maintaining the ESS battery, since I disabled the ESS system via AlfaOBD months ago. I will be a little surprised but not shocked if I find the small battery is totally dead. Probably won't be though, my guess is the IBS keeps up the second battery even if its not being used for ESS it may have other jobs, who knows. If I had more time to study it I'd be curious to know which battery is responsible for powering standby electronics for remote start and passive entry, alarm, etc. I have a hunch its possibly the smaller one.

It would be fun to have a couple of hall-effect sensor monitors that could show which battery is being drawn off of when shutdown, running, etc. Maybe someday, the longer the cars are around the more time we will have to learn about them and share what we learn. Speaking of which, I need to go post some TPMS info somewhere that I learned this week...
 
#9 ·
It happened to me to and I had to replace the battery with a new one, right now is working properly, and also I have a friend who had the same issue and was the battery, and he took it to de dealer because it was lease and they replaced it.
I hope this is helpful to you!✌
 
#11 ·
Hi Leonashurov1992,
Are you considering having a dealer take a closer look? Feel free to PM us if you need any assistance during your service visit.
Alex
JeepCares
 
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