Today I'm going to teach you the proper way to jumpstart your car jumping if your battery's 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 Subaru the battery is dead, Just because it's seven years old it's pretty old, batteries last about 3 to 5 years on average.
As you can hear, it won't start, so I'm going to show you how to safely and properly do a car jumping.
So 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 could reach both batteries. You want to make sure that both cars are separated and don't touch each other when doing car jumping.
You also want to make sure that you take the keys out of the ignition for both vehicles. For each of our vehicles, you want to find the battery and find where the positive and negative leads are. So in the positive (Red), and the negative (Black).
Now if we go over to the Subaru which is not starting, we can look at the battery, and I can see right here, a Black cable, that's our negative, and then the other one is our positive (Red cable). So, once you identify that, you could begin.
Now you're gonna want to take your jumper cables and spread them out, so you have 1 Red and 1 Black in each hand and just detangle the wires, and you'll take out the jumper cables. From this point forward, you don't want the jumper cable ends to touch each other.
The first thing you're going to do is take the one side of the jumper cables, and you're going to get the Red, which is the Positive, and you're going to 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 check if the copper pieces are touching the metal on the post, and make sure there's a good connection. If you want you could wiggle it around a little bit just to make sure you get it in there good. The reason why you touch the Red cable to the dead battery first is that 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, because then you'll be grounding it out. You could just leave it for now, you're gonna connect it to the battery in a second.
Now you're gonna go over to the good battery and you're gonna grab both of our leads just like you did before, don't touch them together. You're going to take the Red one and put it on the positive terminal, which is also Red.
At the good battery, you're gonna get the black lead, and you're gonna attach it to the negative side. Now you have the Black lead and the Red lead on the good battery attached. 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 may cause a spark, and these sparks can ignite any fumes from the battery, and cause an explosion and the car jumping is a fail. Batteries could create hydrogen gas, especially when they're run down and not working properly, and hydrogen gas Is explosive, so to play it safe, just find another grounding point.
Some cars have a ground spot away from the battery specifically for car jumping, so check your owner's manual. Look for a bare piece of metal for a ground, that isn't a moving part, and that isn't attached to an electrical component. So when looking for ground, you want to try to find something that's bare metal.
A good spot to look is on the engine. When you're looking at the engine if there's a nice bear piece of metal because you're trying to avoid sparks next to anything flammable. Make sure it's a nice thick piece of metal, and directly connected to the engine, so you get a good ground. In this case, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go find the Strut tower.
At the strut tower, there's a bunch of good bolts that provide a good ground, and they're also bare metal, so you're going to attach it to that. The other good thing is, the strut tower's away from the battery, so we don't have to worry about sparks. But there are tons of grounds that you could use, in this case, this is just one of them.
Clamp it right down onto that, and make sure you have a good connection. So with the cables all set up, one last thing you want to do is you want to inspect to make sure that these cables are not near any cooling fans or any moving part, now you're can start the engine on the vehicle with a good battery, and let it run for two minutes.
After been running for about two minutes or so you're going to start the engine in the car with a bad battery, in this case, the Subaru and Hopefully it'll startup. Then right away, You want to go and take off the negative terminal first. And if it sparks, it's away from the battery which is being charged and potentially creating hydrogen gas.
If you took off the Red terminal first, you could create a spark right here, which is on top of the battery which wouldn't be good. So you'll remove the negative terminal first, don't let this touch anything, and then you'll remove our positive terminal on the bad battery. Make sure these don't touch. Then you remove the Red cable, and then the Black cable.
And now your car is started so you're not stranded anymore. So let's just 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 five minutes, Let that other car that's running charge up your battery.
Essentially the alternator in the other car is charging your battery, so, sit for five more minutes, take the key out of the ignition, and then in five minutes try starting it again. If it seems like you're really close to starting, but you just need a little bit more juice have another 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 you can't start your engine, your battery could be permanently bad, there could be a bad cell in there, it could be shorted internally, but before you give up, make sure that you have a good connection on both the positive and negative terminals.
How to Properly Do a Car Jumping