Connecting Jumper Cables Backwards Heres What Could Go Wrong

Hope this thing starts today. All right, let's get these cables hooked up here. Okay. Okay, buddy, let's do this. Why isn't this thing starting? Oh, my gosh.

Hey, friends. It's Lenny here from 1A Auto. So I'm sure you saw the video that we put out about how to safely jump-start your vehicle. Oh, god darn it. Of course, there are some people that are out there, they were trying to figure out what might potentially happen if you were to connect the cables backwards. I want to talk about it. If you feel like this is a video that might be helpful to somebody, go ahead and share it with them. Aside from that, let's go ahead and get started.

Now, firstly, we should probably figure out how come somebody might even actually hook up the cables backwards? Maybe, they were looking at it and they couldn't really figure out which cable goes where. So they just figured, "I'll put this one here and this one there." A lot of times when you look at the battery, you should be able to tell which one is the positive and which one is the negative just from looking at the battery itself.

You're gonna see a little plus on there for positive, and a little dash on there, that's for the negative. Sometimes, those are kind of covered in gunk or some kind of debris right there so you can't really tell. Other times, you might happen to find on the particular application that you have a little red cable that leads to the positive. That kind of tells you which one the positive is. But that's not always the case. Sometimes they're just gonna look like they're black and then they lead to that dirty old battery, and you just have no clue what to do.

Or, maybe, you're just kind of in the middle of a stressful situation. The car is not starting for you, you're a little bit late for work, or maybe it's even just a little bit dark outside or even kind of dusky. You can't really see what's exactly going on under the hood, and you just kinda throw them on there all willy-nilly. That looks pretty good.

Or, maybe, you had a dead battery, you went ahead and you tried getting yourself a new one. You went to the book, you found out that it had a couple different options, you didn't know which one that you needed. You grabbed one real quick. You came in here and you tried hooking it up. And come to find out the terminals are actually reversed. There's a couple different types of batteries. Some of them are gonna have the positive on the left side of the battery and then the other ones are gonna have the positive on the other side of the battery. If you were to get the one that has the positive on the opposite side, and then you hook up your cables in the wrong direction, bad idea.

Something that's a little less common is maybe you're trying to hook up your cables to the actual battery itself. Let's see, I'll just pull these things off here. Okay. You're getting ready to hook up the battery cables to the battery, and, for some reason, you take this one. You bring it all the way over here, and then you have... Like I said, it's pretty unlikely that you're gonna be able to switch these cables. Automobile manufacturers know that it's common for people to make mistakes. It's kind of what we do, especially, if we don't know exactly what we're doing. So what they wanna do is, they're gonna kinda try to secure these cables in a position that makes it so they really only reach to the part of the battery that they're supposed to. So you can't just take these cables and do what I'm trying to do here, switch it around. No, it's not gonna work. It's not working.

So I've got some good news and, of course, some bad news. Let's go ahead and start with the bad news, kind of get it over with almost like eating your vegetables first. Hooking up the cables the right way is going to make sure that there's a safe and steady transfer of energy/current flow. Whether it's trying to jump start your vehicle with some cables like this right here, or just your battery to the electrical components themselves. But, by hooking up your cables the wrong way, could cause very major damage to your vehicle's electrical system, especially, in most modern vehicles, which have a lot of electrical things going on internally. So let's just kind of go over some of the scenarios that might happen if you were to hook these up backwards.

Starting with the best case scenario, let's say you go ahead and connect one of them on here like this, go ahead and you try to hook on the next one. Whoa, quick little spark just happened. It scared me fast enough that I removed this ASAP. Theoretically, you're probably safe in this situation. More than likely it happened so quick that nothing even really knows what happened.

Now, something that might happen is maybe you go ahead and you try to hop inside the vehicle after you hooked up your cables, and it just doesn't want to start. Why might this be? Well, of course, maybe there was something to happen, maybe you just blew a little fuse down the line. So, now, maybe, you went ahead and you hopped inside your vehicle, and you tried to start it up. It didn't want to start.

The first thing that I would wanna check is the fuses. Maybe you might have melted some of your wiring. You look around. You can get a little bit of a whiff of something in the air. You start tugging on some wiring and what do you find, melted wires. Not good. Or, even something even worse than that, something a little bit more costly, you could have potentially caused some damage to your PCM, ECU, or even transmission control unit. But the worst case scenario for me might be potentially you went ahead and you tried hooking these up. You were doing it backwards. You made a little spark on top of that battery, and you've got hydrogen gases sitting up on top of there typically. The spark could potentially spark up those hydrogen gases, and boom.

Now, for some good news, the majority of this is probably not even gonna happen. Typically, if you were to just to hook it up really quickly, you might see a quick spark. It's probably gonna scare you enough to make you stop, and you're probably not gonna have too much of an issue after you connect things properly. Other than that, if you happen to connect it for too long of a period of time, most of these cars nowadays are gonna have like a fusible link inside of them or a fuse box, which essentially goes from in between the battery to each electrical circuit inside of your vehicle. For this particular instance, just in case there's some kind of reversal of current or even some kind of spike that might come from your charging system.

So like I said, typically if you do actually end up making a mistake when you're trying to connect something, typically, it's just gonna go ahead and pop one of those fuses. The great thing about that is that they're very cheap. You can find them pretty much anywhere, and they're very easy to fix.

Now, obviously, if you did find that you had burnt wiring or even cables melted to your vehicle, that's something that you're gonna have to go ahead and diagnose and fix. If it's just the cables to the outside of your car right here, more than likely, you're gonna have to do some bodywork. If you find that you have melted wiring like this right here, you're probably gonna have to start chasing things down, because this probably isn't the only area. You're gonna have to start checking out other wiring to make sure it's okay.

Okay, friends. So I hope you liked the video. I hope you learned a little something. Maybe you had something that happened to you that was just like this and you wanna talk about it. Maybe you have a friend that might learn a little something, go ahead and share it. If you like the video, go ahead and smash on the Like button for me, it'd mean a world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell. That way you and all of your friends can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks. All right, let's go ahead and melt this thing.