Jump Starting Your Car Using Another Car

Jump Starting Your Car Using Another Car

If you have ever owned a car, you've undoubtedly had to jump start it at some point in time. There is a right way and many wrong ways to doing it.

What is a jump start? Technically, it is the introduction of an electrical charge to your car's battery from another car. In truth, it the metaphysical idiot stick hitting us, the car owners, in the head. Why do I say this? Well, the reason I need to jump start my car in the vast majority of cases has to do with something stupid I did like leave the lights on. Come on - admit it.

Fortunately, jump starting a car is one of the easier things you will need to deal with when it comes to the pride of car ownership. The primary tool you will need is...jumper cables. In a perfect world, you'll have protective glasses, gloves and a shield of armor as well, but we hardly live in a protective world.

Okay, our first step with the battery is a highly technical one - look at it. Trying to jump start a battery that has a fatal problem is not going to work. So, what are we looking for? Cracks. Broken terminals. A lack of water in the battery. Basically, some sign of failure beyond the fact you left the lights on all night.

Assuming we don't have any major battery failure, you can hookup the cables. Now, this is not nearly as hard as it seems, but people like to make it difficult. Let's go through the basics.

A battery has a positive and negative charge. These are represented by the two metal terminals sticking out the top. How can you tell which is which? Well, they are marked. If it is dark, you can use a trick. The one that is covered by rubber is the positive terminal, while the negative terminal should have no cover.

Your jump start cables have two attachment clamps on each end. One is red and one is black. It does not matter whether you attach the red to the positive or negative, so long as you do the same thing on both cars. Just to be clear, this means that if you attach the red clamp to the positive on your battery, you better attach the red clamp at the other end of the cable to the positive terminal on the battery of the other car. Very important!

So, to pull this off have the other driver pull up to a couple feet from your car. Do not let the cars touch! Now have them turn off their car and pop the hood. Hook up your cables remember to match the colors to the terminals. Have them fire up their car. Wait a couple of minutes and then fire yours up. If it doesn't turn over, give it some more time. If it doesn't start in 10 minutes, it isn't going to.

Now, there is one important caveat to all of this. If you live in a cold area, your battery may actually freeze. Jump starting a frozen battery is a bad, bad move. Don't do it. Just get a new one.

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