joco, the check engine light will remain lit for 5 starts after the fault has cleared. On the 6th start, the light will clear. So, unless you have started your car 6 times, the light will remain lit (unless the tech cleared the code, then if the light is still on, then the fault is still there).

When you say that you are having problems starting the car, are you saying that the starter will not engage (ie, the motor will not turn over) or are you saying that it takes longer time to hold the key in the start position before the motor finally fires? This will send us down different paths.

 

joco, if you have been running the car with the alternator weak for an extended period of time, you could have stressed the battery enough to have caused damage to it. The standard batteries that you tend to buy for vehicles don't like to be charged and discharged over and over. Starting the car is fine because the amount of power pulled from the battery is very minimal (less than 1 percent of the total power). Where, if you have a bad alternator and you are sucking say 50% of the power out of the battery before the alternator decides to start working again, the plates take a lot of the abuse and over time they reach a point where they will no longer work efficiently. It is at this point that you will see the starter not spinning the starter as fast, which in turn results in a longer start time (ie, key held in the start position longer before the engine fires).

I would say to take your car to a local auto parts store and they should be able to put a load tester on the battery. If they say it is bad, you still have a little bit of time, but the longer starts is not going to get better. So, a new battery will be in your future. If they say the battery is good, then let me know and I will see what else we can do for you. How are you with using a multimeter?

 

joco, the "tech" at the auto parts store should not have tested the battery in the first place had the battery not been at a full charge. The tech that said that a drained battery will test bad is correct. So, at this point, hard to say what it was. I would be happy just to have the light off. I can't think of much that you could do to figure out what was bad at this point. If you do get the light again, please spend the $15 at an auto parts store for a basic multimeter and I will step you through how to isolate the problem down to a single component.