digest
Hey guys, Chris Fix here. Today I'm going to teach you the proper way to jump start your car. If your battery is dead, it's happened to all of us. You leave your headlights on, your battery just drains for some reason, and you need a jump. In my 95 Ford Windstar, the battery is dead just because it's 7 years old. Batteries last about 4 years on average, and as you could hear, it won't start. So I'm going to show you how to safely and properly jump a car.
The first step is to get a car that runs and pull it up to the car with the dead battery so the jumper cables can reach both batteries. You want to make sure that both cars are separated and don't touch each other. When you do this, you also want to make sure that you take the keys out of the ignition for both vehicles. For each of the vehicles, you want to find the battery and find where the positive and negative leads are. This is my truck battery, the one that works. Here's the positive, it's red, and here's the negative, it's black. Now if we go over to the van, which is not starting, we can look at the battery, and you can see right here a black cable, that's our negative, and this one is our positive, a red cable. Once you identify that, we can begin. Now you're going to want to take your jumper cables and spread them out so you have one red and one black in each hand, and detangle the wires. Here's the dead battery in our van. From this point forward, we don't want the jumper cable ends to touch each other.
The first thing we're going to do is take one side of the jumper cables. We're going to get our red, which is our positive, and attach it to the positive side of the dead battery. You want to make sure you get a good connection right on that battery post. You can see that these copper pieces are touching the metal on the post, and there's a good connection. If you want, you can wiggle it around a little bit, just make sure you get it in there good. The reason you attach the red cable to the dead battery first is because the dead battery doesn't have as much energy as the good battery, so starting here is the safest. You could take your ground and just put it on a piece of plastic. You don't want your ground touching any bare metal, or you'll be grounding it out. You can just leave it there for now. We're going to connect it to the battery in a second.
Now we're going to go over to the good battery. We're going to grab both of our leads just like we did before, and not touch them together. We're going to take our red one and put it on the positive terminal, which is also red, at the good battery. We're going to get our black lead and attach it to our negative side here. Now we have the black lead and the red lead on the good battery. Back at the dead battery, this is the last lead we have to attach, but you aren't going to attach it to the negative battery terminal. Touching the lead to the negative battery terminal will cause a spark, and these sparks can ignite any fumes from the battery and cause an explosion. Batteries can create hydrogen gas, especially when they're run down and not working properly, and hydrogen gas is explosive. So to play it safe, find another grounding point. Some cars have a ground spot away from the battery specifically for jumping your car, so check your owner's manual. If not, find a bare piece of metal for a ground that isn't a moving part and isn't attached to an electrical component.
When looking for a ground, try to find something that's bare metal. If we look here, there's a nice ground, but unfortunately this wire is pretty thin, so if you don't have a good connection to this ground, you could actually melt it. A good spot to look is on the engine. Here's a nice bare piece of metal, but my problem with this is that it's right next to the fuel pressure regulator, and we're trying to avoid sparks next to anything flammable. So this isn't a spot I would want to use, though it's a nice thick piece of metal, bare, and directly connected to the engine. In my case, I'm going to find the strut tower. As you can see on my strut tower, there's a bunch of good bolts that provide a good ground, and they're also bare metal, so we're going to attach it to that. The other good thing is this strut tower is away from the battery, so we don't have to worry about sparks. There are tons of grounds you could use. This is just one of them. Get in there, clamp right down onto that, and make sure you have a good connection.
With our cables all set up, one last thing to do is inspect to make sure these cables are not near any cooling fans. Our cooling fans are over here, so we don't have to worry about that, and our serpentine belt is on the other side, so we don't have to worry about that either. Now that our cables are clear, let's check the other side. Moving to the good battery side, the fan is right here, as well as the serpentine belt, and our cables are out of the way over here. So we're ready to jump the vehicle. We're going to start the engine on my truck, which is the good battery, and let it run for 2 minutes. My truck has been running for about 2 minutes, so we're going to start the engine in my van. Hopefully it'll start up. There we go.
Right away, you want to take off the negative terminal first. If I take this off and it sparks, it's away from the battery, which is being charged and potentially creating hydrogen gas. If we took off the red terminal first, we could create a spark right here on top of the battery, which wouldn't be good. So we'll remove the negative terminal first. Don't let this touch anything, then remove our positive terminal on the bad battery. Make sure these don't touch. Then remove the red cable, then the black cable, and now your car is started, so you're not stranded anymore.
Let's give a scenario where you go to start your car and it doesn't work. It slowly drags but you don't get the car started. Let the car sit for another 5 minutes and let the other car that's running charge up your battery. Essentially the alternator in the other car is charging your battery, so sit for 5 more minutes, take the key out of the ignition, and in 5 minutes try starting it again. If it seems like you're really close to starting but you just need a little more juice, have the person in the car with the good battery rev up the engine to about 2,000 RPMs and hold it there as you try to start the vehicle with the dead battery. This will get the alternator spinning faster, so you'll have more power to start the car with the bad battery.
After all that, if all you get is a click and it can't start, your battery could be permanently bad. There could be a bad cell in there, or it could be shorted internally. But before you give up, make sure you have a good connection on both the positive and negative terminals. Check the connections on the bad battery as well as the good battery. Another thing to do is, if you attach it to this ground and it won't start the car, try connecting it to a better ground. A lot of times, switching to another ground will start the car.
Hopefully this video taught you how to properly jump your car. If the video was helpful, remember to give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing. The top tip for this video is about one of these portable jumpers. These portable jumpers are great to have in your car, they're really easy to use, and you don't have to rely on anybody to be there to help you jump your car. You can do it yourself with one of these jumpers. All you have to do is make sure it's in the off position, take your red jumper cable and connect it to the positive terminal, and then your black jumper cable can connect directly to the battery. There's no need to connect it to a separate ground like we did when we jumped the car, because there's an on/off switch and no electrical current going through these jumpers. If you really want to, you could touch the two jumpers together and nothing will happen. So when we connect the black lead to the negative terminal, there are no sparks at all, so we can connect directly to the battery's negative terminal. Now all we have to do is turn it to the on position and go start the car. She started right up. Right away, you just switch this off, then disconnect both jumper cables, and you're good to go.