How To Clean Battery Terminals 2004-09 Subaru Outback

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

Disconnect the negative battery terminal. Use the 10-millimeter wrench to loosen it. Get that loose, then we can take the terminal off, put that aside. Now we can loosen the positive terminal, so lift up the protective cover. And just be sure that when you're loosening this, that this wrench doesn't touch the other terminal or touch another piece of metal, because you'll short to ground, you'll get a spark, and you could hurt yourself. So loosen this up with a 10-millimeter. Wiggle the terminal off of here, and put that aside.

Now take some baking soda, about a spoonful of it, and some nice warm water, about a cup of it. We'll mix it in there. This is hot water with baking soda in it, you can take an old toothbrush, and we'll just toothbrush in here, pour a little bit on the terminals, start to bubble and fizz, and we can clean off the terminals. You can see it's dissolving the corrosion. Pour it all over the top of the battery, just clean it off. Baking soda works to neutralize the battery acid.

Now you can take the terminals. Scrub the terminals off. These have some greasy terminal protector on them, but there is some corrosion coming off. Of course once you're done with that toothbrush, you want to throw it away. Or you can save it for doing other battery cleaning jobs, but you never again want to use it for a toothbrush. So now I'm just going to take some plain hot water and just rinse off the battery, now that I cleaned it with the baking soda mixture. Clean off the terminal.

You can let this air-dry, or dry it off with a paper towel. Clean off the terminal, dry it off. The same with the positive terminal.

You can reinstall the positive terminal. I'm just going to have the key handy because the alarm might go off when I reconnect the negative terminal, but before I do that, I'm going to tighten up the positive terminal. Get it tightened down here. Feel it get tight, stop. Reinstall the protective cover. I'm going to reconnect the negative terminal. I have the key here ready because the alarm might go off. It did not. Sometimes if the alarm was set, and then the battery died or was disconnected, then it will automatically trigger the alarm when the battery's reconnected. I'm just going to tighten this up. The battery terminals are nice and clean now.

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