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Hey, buddy, can I get a jump? Hey, what's going on? Is your battery dead?
Hey friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. In this video we're going to go over how to safely jump start your vehicle and some things to think about along the way. Let's get started. Real quick, before we get started, I wanted to touch on safety. You want hand and eye protection at all times, anytime you're dealing with your battery or on your vehicle in general.
Now, if somebody came over and asked me to jump start their vehicle, one of the first things I would want to do is try to test the battery to make sure it's in good functioning order. Try to grab onto these terminal ends and make sure they're not loose in any way and they can't pivot. If these are loose, of course they're going to have an issue, and they might not be able to start the vehicle.
Something else to think about is the overall condition. If you see corrosion like this, that's kind of a telltale sign that there's going to be a battery draw, and it's a very potential cause of why the battery might have gone low in the first place.
Something else you want to pay attention to is the manufacture date of the battery itself. Overall, most times batteries are going to last approximately five years, depending on your charging system and the number of times you use it, or the frequency with which you use your vehicle. So if you leave your vehicle sitting for a long period of time, maybe several days, weeks, or even months, obviously the battery is going to drain down a little bit over time, especially if you have some corrosion like this. It might potentially cause an issue if the battery level or charge goes down too much. Then, of course, your vehicle is not going to be able to start, and you're going to find that you have this issue.
If you have access to a multimeter, it's a good idea to quickly test the voltage so you know what your starting point is. Here I'm just going to connect the positive to the positive and negative to the negative, and we're going to take a look at that voltage. This battery is actually in good condition right here, so it wouldn't actually cause a potential slow start condition. But if your vehicle battery voltage is super low, like this one, obviously you're going to be able to tell that you're going to have a starting issue. A healthy battery should be between 12.4 and 12.6 volts. If you need more information about your battery health or how to test it, check out our link in the description below, and that'll tell you about battery health.
Something to think about real quick when it comes time to jump starting your vehicle is the fact that you're going to have different engine sizes and battery sizes. This truck right here has a V8 engine, and it's a big old engine. It takes a lot of energy, slash voltage, to start it up. This one over here is a beautiful engine. It's highly fuel economic, but it's much smaller in general, so with that said, it doesn't require as much voltage to be able to turn over and start. So if you were to look at the batteries, you're probably going to see a very big difference, and that brings us in to cold cranking amps. So let's come right over to the smaller vehicle here, and I can see right on the battery it says 525 cold cranking amps and 650 cranking amps, and that's at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, looking at the larger vehicle here, we can see that our cranking amps are much higher, and of course the cold cranking amps are higher as well. With that said, if I was trying to jump start my truck, the V8 with a much smaller battery, it's going to have a much harder time trying to start, because that battery isn't going to be able to put out as much cold cranking amps to help me start this vehicle. But if you think about it the other way around, this battery has much more cold cranking amps, and it's going to have a much easier time trying to start that smaller engine over there.
Okay, so now it's time to get our jumper cables. It's good to have a nice set of jumper cables for just this type of situation. The way I'm going to do it is take one side of the wires, just like this. You have a red and a black. The red one is positive, and the black one is ground. The red goes to positive on the good, known battery, right on there, so we're making great contact all the way across. Let's see if I can get it perfect. Now for the negative, I'm just going to leave this hanging, and I want to keep it away from anything that is going to create contact with the negative terminal or even ground out to the vehicle.
Now let's continue on to the vehicle with the bad battery. We're going to come right over here. I'm going to connect the positive right on the positive lead, trying to get around that corrosion. They're going to have to clean that up. Now we're going to leave the negative for the bad battery right over here, same thing, so it's not connected. Come back over to the good battery, and we'll go ahead and connect this onto the terminal, making sure we have a good connection. That feels perfect.
Okay, so here we are back over at the vehicle with the bad battery. This right here is where it kind of gets a little controversial. Some people will say connect it right to the negative battery terminal. I don't tend to lean that way. I prefer to go to a ground that's on the engine, so I'm going to find something that looks like this. It's a nice metal mount right here. You know it's structurally integral, and it's of course grounded. We'll connect it right on there, give it a nice wiggle, and make sure there's nothing in between, such as rust or debris or anything like that. That feels great.
Now, the reason I decided to ground to the engine rather than going to the terminal itself is for a couple of different reasons. The first reason is that, as you can read right on the battery, inside of it there's sulfuric acid. Also, there could be explosive gases lingering around the vent area. So if I was to make a connection here and it arched or sparked, well, it's going to be right near that, and that's no good. By connecting it to the ground right here on your engine, it ensures that you have a proper ground between your engine and your battery. So if you try to jump it like this and it doesn't want to start, that's kind of telling you there's something going on with the ground. Also, by connecting it to a ground on the engine, it's going to create a fused circuit, so you don't cause any damage to either of the vehicle's computers. Another reason for doing this is just in case the battery's shorted out internally. You're not going to have an issue where something explodes in your face.
So now that we have our cables properly hooked up, we're going to go ahead and start up the vehicle. One little thing I did real quick is put the multimeter right here on the battery so we can see what's going on. Like I said, we have an okay battery in this vehicle right now, but I want to show you what happens when I actually start up the good, known vehicle.
Okay, so we just started up the vehicle. Coming over here, we're going to look at this multimeter. What I can see is the voltage came right up. It's looking at approximately 14 volts. That's telling me that my alternator from my vehicle is coming right through these cables and charging this up slowly. All right, so I like to let the vehicle sit for maybe a minute just like this, and that's just going to give the battery a little bit of charge. What I'm not trying to do is charge this whole battery with the good, known battery slash alternator of the other vehicle. So let's jump right in. We're going to start it up, let it run for maybe a minute or so, and then we'll start disconnecting.
Now, before we go ahead and try to start this vehicle, we want to make sure that everything's off as much as possible. So go ahead and make sure your blower motor is in the off position, make sure your wiper blades and, of course, your headlights are in the off position. Turn on the key and take a look. Make sure your radio is turned off as well. Essentially, anything that's going to try to draw power, we want to turn off, so all the power we have is going to go straight to that starter and start up our car.
Okay, so we have the vehicle started now. I'm going to look at this multimeter right here. This is looking real good. We're looking at approximately 14.36 right there. It looks great. So let's start disconnecting things. We're going to disconnect these in reverse order. I'm going to start right here and take it right off. Now I'm going to set it so there's no way it can make contact with anything that's going to ground it out. We're going to move on over to our good, known battery and disconnect this as well. Make sure you hold these apart. There we go. With our multimeter still hooked up, we can look at this right here, and I can tell that the alternator is still working, so that's good news. We want to make sure the alternator is working. That way, we can take this for a nice drive, charge up the battery, and then of course re-test the battery with the multimeter when we're done.
Let's talk about this real quick. Some people might say it's a good idea to rev the engine on the good, known vehicle while you're trying to jump start the vehicle with the low or dead battery. The reason it doesn't make sense to me to rev the engine on the vehicle I'm jumping with is that the alternator is not supposed to provide a big burst of power to the battery to actually start your vehicle. It's more just supposed to charge the battery once you start the vehicle. We're not actually trying to charge the battery on the dead vehicle over here. All we're trying to do is provide enough amperage and voltage to start the vehicle. Once it's started, at that point the vehicle's own alternator should be doing the job of charging the battery.
The reason we want to start the engine on the vehicle we're jumping with is so that as we draw power from this battery, we're not going to draw it down so low that our vehicle won't want to start in the long run. Also, if we have this one running, it's going to be able to get charged up by the alternator at the same time as it's helping out the other person's battery on the other side.
Now, with the cables off and the vehicle running, essentially your car should be able to run using only the alternator. So even if the battery was completely dead, you should still be able to drive down the road and potentially charge the battery. If, for some reason, when you disconnected those cables the car turned immediately off and didn't want to crank over again, more than likely you have an issue where the alternator isn't functioning the way it should, and it should be tested. Because if the alternator isn't putting out enough amperage to charge your battery, you're going to have an issue. Maybe if the alternator is bad, you drove all the way to work just running off your battery voltage, and maybe it got you there somehow, and that's great. But by the time you parked it, went inside, did your thing, and came back out to start it, the battery voltage is too low to start your vehicle.
Something to think about is that the alternator is meant to charge your battery over the long term. It's not going to be a short-term thing. It's not just going to pump in 500 amps all at once. It's going to be much lower in amperage, slowly trickle charging the battery back up. It's a good idea to immediately take your vehicle for a nice road test after you've jump started it, so your alternator can continue doing its job for an extended period of time and charge up that battery.
To answer the question of whether it's a good idea to rev the engine on the good, known battery so you can come over here to the dead battery and jump start it: it's not necessarily going to be helpful. The reason we're jump starting the vehicle is, like it says, we're jump starting it. We're not trying to charge this battery. The alternator over there will put out a little more amperage if you rev the engine, but it's not going to help this jump start in any way. Overall, all this power is coming from the battery, not from the alternator.
Okay, friends, that's what I've got for you on jump starting your vehicle. Hopefully you learned a little something along the way. If you did, you want to talk about it, leave it in the comment section below, because I always love to hear from you. If you like the video, smash the like button for me, and while you're at it, why don't you subscribe and ring the bell, so you can keep up with all of our latest content? Thanks.