Common Jump Start Mistakes

I'm okay. Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So we've all experienced a weak or even dead battery. Does it ever happen at a convenient time? Well, when would be a convenient time for your battery and your particular vehicle to end up dying on you?

Getting out of here. Getting out of here. Oh, doggone it. Why? Oh, hey, hey, hey.

Do you need a jump?

Yeah. My battery's dead.

Okay.

Now, I probably don't need to tell you that by using a smaller car or at least a car that has a much smaller battery with lower cranking amps isn't necessarily gonna be able to start up a big old V8 engine like this one right here. Why is that? Because the small car theoretically is gonna have four little cylinders inside of it that are gonna go [vocalization]. This one right here has eight big old cylinders inside of it that are going, puh, puh, puh and they need to be powered up. And, of course, you need to have the strong battery to be able to make them move to get the engine started.

I'm gonna get under the hood here. Oh, this battery's teeny. That's not gonna work.

Well, it might be possible to be able to actually jumpstart your truck or a larger engine with a smaller engine or smaller battery, especially if maybe you just left the dome light on, you went inside the store for a couple of minutes, you came back out, and the battery just drained down a little bit too low to be able to start. Typically, you're gonna hear a little bit of a clicking noise, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, or even worse, maybe just like a [vocalization]. But if you go ahead and you try to turn the key and nothing at all happens, the lights don't even turn on or anything, more than likely using that small battery or a smaller car to be able to jumpstart this bigger truck is gonna be an issue. And pretty much that's all gonna come down to cold-cranking amps, referring to the battery itself. So a smaller battery is generally gonna have less cold cranking amps than a larger battery.

Dude. It's not gonna work. Whoa. Oh, man, I'm never gonna get this thing started.

Oh, hey buddy. Hey, can I get a jump?

Yeah, sure.

Cool. So, now let's say you're in your safe place and somebody comes up and they're getting ready to help you jumpstart your vehicle. Proper etiquette would say, of course, the person with the live vehicle would probably be the one that's gonna jumpstart your dead vehicle. But something to think about that is not everybody necessarily knows how to jumpstart a vehicle properly. Thanks, man.

Yeah, no problem.

I really appreciate it.

The thing gets stuck. There we go. Okay. All right. Geez. Yeah, I got this, right?

You know how to use these things?

Yeah, sure.

All right. You got this, right?

Yeah. It's fine.

I mean, ehhh.

No, I'm good. I do this all the time.

No, no, no.

Yeah, no, it's fine. Okay. All right.

So, of course, if they were to hook up the cables wrong or do something that they shouldn't do, it could potentially not only damage your vehicle, but it might even damage their vehicle as well. Obviously, that's gonna be a big issue. It could lead from something that's a very cheap and easy fix to something that's even more expensive down the line.

Hey buddy, can you hold on to these for me?

Yeah.

Thanks. Doing this over a puddle makes no sense. Something else to mention, some people like to go ahead and rev up the good/running car when they're trying to jumpstart another vehicle. Well, that might be fine if you get up to about 2,000 RPMs, but anything above that is really just overkill. So if you're sitting there and you're hammering on that gas pedal until the rev limiter comes up, bing, bing, bing, that's not really gonna do too much more than just if you went up to approximately 2,000 RPMs. And why is that? Because inside of your alternator, it's also gonna have a voltage regulator. Essentially, what that's going to do is the maximum voltage that that alternator is gonna be able to push out is approximately 13.5 to 14.5 volts overall. So it doesn't really matter if you go up to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 or even higher. It really doesn't matter like I said, the only difference is gonna be the amount of noise coming from underneath the hood of the car.

There we go. I got it.

All right, I'll go hit the gas.

No.

What?

No, no.

What?

Now, where's the best place to go ahead and try to jumpstart your car? Obviously, you can't really pick where your battery is going to end up dying on you and where you're going to be able to jumpstart it. But what you do wanna do is pay attention to your surroundings. If you're sitting at a gas station or anything the like, more than likely, there's going to be flammable type things around there, and it's not the best place to go ahead and try to jumpstart a car. And if you do happen to break down at a gas station or someplace that you feel as though is a little bit unsafe, the best thing that you could probably do is to carefully take your key and put it in the on position, take that gear selector and put it in neutral. The next thing you want to do is have a couple of people behind the truck or vehicle that you have and carefully push it into a safe place.

At that point, it's gonna be the safest for you to be able to go ahead and try to jumpstart your automobile. Now, once you have your jumper cables properly installed, what you're going to wanna do is make sure you're inside the dead vehicle. And you want to make sure that you turn off all of your accessories. What I mean by that is maybe if you leave your headlights on auto, so when you turn on the truck, it's gonna automatically turn on those headlights, turn them off. You got your wiper blades on because maybe it was raining or something the like, make sure those are off as well. I'm just gonna go ahead and switch these. And, of course, if the radio is gonna want to turn on, you wanna make sure you turn that off ASAP. Anything that's gonna cause an extra draw on the battery as you're trying to jumpstart it, of course, is gonna cause a little bit more of an issue. It's already having a hard time starting, why give it a harder time overall?

Let's take a second and talk about how to properly hook up your jumper cable so that way there, when you're doing this, you don't necessarily have to make any of the mistakes that we've made so far. Now, the first thing I wanna do is carefully take one of my positive ends right here, and I'm gonna go ahead and put it right onto my positive terminal. Once I have that clamped, I'm gonna take the negative end from the same side of the cables and I'm gonna put it on something that's not making contact with anything that will ground it or connect it to the negative battery terminal in any way. I found some plastic and it's away from everything. Now we can come right over to the live battery. And at this point, we want to be very careful because once we connect both of these, we're going to have current trying to flow through this. So once we grab onto that other wire over there, if it touches anything that's metal and grounds it out, well, you're gonna see some sparks.

So, here we go. I'm gonna go ahead and connect this right onto the positive right here. Make sure that I have a nice connection on there. Wiggle it around. Now I'll take the negative, I'm gonna put it right on there as well. Now, at this point, you want to be very careful with the cables because we don't want anything to rattle around. And like I said, we definitely don't want that negative cable to ground out on anything. Carefully grab onto this. Now, the next thing that somebody might want to try to do is go ahead and connect this onto the negative battery terminal right here. Well, like I already told you before, if I was to connect it on here, even though I'm connecting it in properly, it could potentially make a spark. And, of course, if it makes a spark while there's hydrogen gas is hanging out along the top of this battery, of course, it could cause an explosion or worse. So I'm just gonna take this and I'm gonna come right down to a ground that's right next to my engine. I'm gonna go right on here and connect it on. Now, at this point, we can go ahead and start up the donor vehicle or the one with the live battery, we're gonna let it run for just maybe like a minute or so, just to give this battery a little bit of a charge. After that, we can hop in the truck, fingers crossed, it'll start right up.

Let's see. I got some dinging now. That's a plus. Yes. It's alive. Okay. So, now that the truck's been running for approximately a minute, I'm pretty sure that the batteries at least get enough charge for the alternator to make the truck continue running. At this point, we can start disconnecting our cables, but keep in mind, once I take off this side right here, the other side is still gonna be connected. So, you definitely want to make sure that neither of the cables touch up against anything metal. I've said it before, but I'm going to say it again. The first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and grab onto this ground right here. Let's remove that carefully, and then I'm gonna come over, I'm gonna remove this one as well. At this point, I'll just hold this ground so it's kind of coming down like that and I'll keep this up and away from everything. Disconnect the positive over here. And now at this point, it really doesn't matter what you do with the cables because there isn't any energy getting transferred between the cables.

Just keep in mind if you do end up taking off the jumper cables too quick right after you end up starting up your vehicle, what you might happen to notice is it's just gonna stall right out on you. And you're to start wondering what's going on. It's because like I said, the alternator didn't have time to be able to catch up and start charging up the system on its own. Let's talk briefly about the alternator. Of course, that's gonna be an integral part of the electrical system. Without the alternator, the battery is not gonna be able to keep a charge or even maintain a charge. So obviously, if the alternator itself has issues such as maybe it's not charging because it's internally gone bad, that can cause an issue. If it's not gonna charge the battery, the truck's not going to start. Something else that might potentially happen with the alternator is you might start hearing a funny sound and maybe even a little funny smell coming from it. If you have either of those happening, odds are there's an internal issue with the alternator and more than likely, it's not going to be charging the battery properly.

Other than that, there could potentially be an issue with the serpentine belt. That's the belt that powers the alternator. If the serpentine belt falls off and it's not coming around the crank and then going around the alternator, the alternator can't spin, it's not gonna create a charge, and it's not gonna be able to charge up your battery. Overall, that's no good. Once you have the truck running, you want, of course, drive it so you can be able to charge up the battery. Not necessarily like that, but if you just carefully take your truck for a drive down the highway, typically just going at the highway speeds, the alternator is gonna be able to do its job and it's gonna charge up the battery for you. Something else that I want you to think about is if you've had to jumpstart your battery multiple times. Generally, if that's the case, you might have an issue with the battery itself. Batteries nowadays really only last approximately four to five years. Back in the olden days, they could last six, seven, eight, even nine years sometimes.

But the EPA has changed things around a little bit, and the inside of the battery is much different than what it was before. And, of course, that's for very good reasons. Other than that, besides just the battery itself, you might have an electrical draw. Why might you have an electrical draw? Well, like I said, maybe you left a dome light on or something the like, but more than likely, it could also be because there's a rodent in the house. Maybe you got a mouse, it's trying to make a nice house inside of your engine compartment. Why is that? Well, because, of course, there isn't very much moisture in there and typically, it's a little warm under there. Mice are gonna like that. They're also gonna be hungry though. So they're gonna just kind of mosey around, they're going to find things to chew on, and they're going to bring it home to their nest to try to help make it. When they do that, if they chew through some of your wires, well, then you know you're going to have an issue because if one of those power wires happens to ground out on something, it's gonna cause a little arc, but you're not even gonna see it, but it will actually cause a draw on your electrical system.

Something else that I want you to think about is if you've had to jumpstart your battery multiple times. Generally, if that's the case, you might have an issue with the battery itself. Batteries nowadays really only lasts approximately four to five years. So, obviously, you're gonna wanna take a close look at your battery. You wanna see if you can find a date sticker on it. Make sure that your battery isn't over five years old. If it is, more than likely it's gonna be time for replacement, especially in newer age vehicles like this one right here. Overall, you can try to test your battery with a multimeter. That's gonna kind of gauge exactly where the voltage is at, but it's not necessarily the best at seeing what's going on on the inside of the battery. They have special testers for that.

Okay, friends, so the mistakes on this video are done with. You've seen what not to do and a couple of things on what you should do. Hopefully, you learned a little something, maybe you want to talk about it. If you've got a story of your own, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you like the video or love the video, go ahead and smash on that like button for me. It would mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.