How to use Car Jumper Cables – A Simple Step by Step Guide

Your cars battery is one of the most critical and most often used components in your vehicle. Without this component, you would be unable to turn on the air condition, listen to radio, not to talk of starting your car. Doing things like leaving the lights on, or not closing one or more doors for a long period can all combine to run down your battery. A dead battery has a way of messing up your day.

Returning to your car to find its battery has gone flat, is a frustrating experience, but if you have access to a set of jumper cables in can be easily remedied. If you have decided you want to get your car jump started, the first thing you need to locate is someone who can help you that has a car with a charged and working battery.

Below are the steps you need to follow if you want to get your car battery jump started.

• Make sure you park the two cars side by side or in opposite direction to each other with just about one foot separating them. Switch off all the lights, radio and all the electrical components of both cars. Put automatic cars in park and manual cars in neutral.
• Now take your jumper cables, unwind them. Also avoid contact of the red and the black terminals when connected.
• Locate and identify the positive and the negative terminals of your battery. Sometimes the positive terminal is usually wider and has a plus sign (+), and the negative marked with as minus sign (-)
• Figure out the jumper cables too. They are mostly distinguished by stripes and sometimes colors, or marked “+” and “–“. The positive clamp is usually red or with stripes, while the negative clamp will be black.
• Now clamp one positive end of your jumper cable on the positive terminal of the dead battery, and clamp the other positive end on the positive terminal of the live and working battery. Also, take one negative end of the cable and make sure it is clamped on the negative terminal of the live battery. At this point, there is electricity in the cable, so you should be careful with them.
• Clamp the only remaining negative end of the cable on any tangible metal in the car that is not greased or painted. This is done to prevent acid from spilling from the battery and igniting.
• Now go ahead and start the car with the good battery and let it run for some time. You may want to rev the engine but this shouldn’t be done excessively. This helps to really charge up the dead battery in the second car.
• After a while, go ahead and start your car (the one with the dead battery). This could take a few attempts but if it doesn’t start after five or six tries, leave it and let it charge some more.
• Finally, once you have successfully charged your battery, you now need to disconnect the jumper cable in the reverse order you have connected them.

That is all there is to it. You now know how to use car jumper cable. Just follow the steps outlined above and you should have no problems starting your car the next time the battery dies.

 

More Info:

http://www.wikihow.com/Hook-up-Jumper-Cables
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_start_(vehicle)