Jumping a Car Battery

Stopping depends on the situation. If you can't/don't want to stop, you could still call for help for the person.

I was in BFE, but at a place of business during operating hours. There were two families and several children running around. No red flags in my book.

 

You need to do that before you jump the battery.

 

I drove wrecker for five years and never had a battery blow up, so here are a few nuggets of wisdom:

1) Put out your fucking cigarette. Red to red, black to black. Never touch cable clamps together. Always hook the cables to the dead battery first. Always make sure all cables are clear of fans, belts and all moving parts. Make sure both cars are in park (not touching) and set the parking brakes. Once the cables are all hooked up, start the engine of the live car.

2) The reason you might not want to hook terminal-to-terminal is that batteries, especially older lead-acid ones, can emit small amounts of hydrogen gas around the terminals and can cause fire/explosion danger. However most batteries made in recent decades are sealed so that is not common.

3) Hooking the negative cable to a ground point is not a bad idea but sometimes it is not that easy to find one, and dashing the cable clamp on metal surfaces under the hood can ALSO produce sparks. Besides battery hydrogen, cars give off a lot of aromatic little gases that can go blooey all over under the hood.

4) Especially if your battery cables are older and if you see visible corrosion/crud on the cable ends, you may have erratic continuity. In this case mounting the clamp directly on the terminal post is the most direct way to get juice into the battery. If the cable ends are loose to the touch or have visible crud on the terminals, you may have to take them off and clean them with a wire brush.

5) Never jump a battery with visible liquid leaks or cracks in the case. Junk it. In the case the battery is NOT sealed, open the caps and make sure the cells are not dry. If so, add water (distilled is preferable but tap water works) and replace the caps. If more than one cell is dry, the battery is probably shot.

6) No matter how you hook up the cables, do NOT lean directly over the battery. Get to the side, preferably behind it. Just in case.

7) Once the dead car starts, unhook the cable clamps in reverse order. Do NOT throw the cables to the side. I saw a guy do it once and of course the cable clamps dashed together and threw off a HUGE spark. Dumbass.

 

Starman has spoken.

So it is written, so it shall be.

 

I grew up in a big city, as did my dad, who taught me how to jump a battery and change a tire. He also packed the emergency crate -- jumper cables, flashlight and road flares, tire pump, sand, tow chain (though the guy who hauled me out of a ditch awhile back wouldn't listen when I tried to show him where to hook it up!), bottled water, snow scraper and brush, etc., etc. -- which has traveled in the trunks of several of my cars.

That said, I will still call AAA for help.

 

Back when cars had real jacks, changing a tire wasn't a big deal. Now, it seems like every car jack is one of the crank kind where you have to crawl under the car to place the scissor hoist under the axle, then turn a screw to lift the car. Huge pain in the ass, especially if you're like me and on the back side of 50.

One thing I did learn fairly late in life, though. Never go on a long trip without some bottled water stored in the car. My wife and I were driving back from Texas one time and we'd gotten a couple of miles onto the long bridge on I-10 over the Atchafalaya Basin between Lafayette and Baton Rouge when traffic on the eastbound lane completely stopped. Two 18-wheelers had wrecked and one of them had spilled his entire load of bananas onto the roadway. We were stuck there for 5 hours without anything to drink or eat. I did finally walk back to where the rest stop was and hit the vending machine, but it was a valuable lesson learned.

 

Wow. I've lived in real cities my entire life and I know how to jump a battery, change a tire, etc. And it has virtually nothing to do with the climate you happen to live in either.

It isn't that hard. If I can do it, etc. ...

 

And I'm not saying you shouldn't.

I just disagreed with Zeke's point that the 20-somethings who don't know how are somehow less important people or that their school systems failed them. Choose to know it, be self-sufficient? Peachy keen.

But it's not something that's covered in any driver's ed class I've heard about (until his, apparently) and it's not something I expect people to know.

 

Yeah, my "driver's ed" was similar to IJAG's: learn a bunch of signs and symbols (half of which I'm still convinced you can only find in Europe), and then a spin around the parking lot with an instructor. Oh, and spend 80% of your time worrying about parallel parking, which I probably haven't had to do more than 100 times in my adult life.

My dad was the person who taught me how to actually drive ... and how to work the jumper cables and tire jack my parents made sure were in my trunk, and how to properly maintain a car over time. If not for them, I would have been as clueless as most of my friends were about car safety.

That said, I definitely err on the side of Zeke here: If you operate a car by yourself and you have access to Google or YouTube, there's no excuse for not learning how to at least jump a battery and fix a flat tire. Those two skills, at the bare minimum, can save you a ton of time and money if you ever get stranded. Anything else, yeah, I'm probably going to call AAA first too, because I'm the least mechanically inclined person I know. But it takes 90 seconds to start a car on a jump, and 10 minutes to change a tire. I'd much rather take care of business and get the hell on my way than wait a half-hour (or 3.5 hours, which happened to me once on freaking I-85 just outside the Perimeter after my engine block, uhh, fell out) for AAA to send a truck out there.

 

I taught my kid the whole jump-start and change-a-tire routine, which has come in very handy for her given the number of times she's had to do both in the last two years.

Greatest compliment my oldest kid has ever paid me: "If I have kids, I want you to teach them how to drive."

 

In the driver's defense, it took him that long to go 2.1 miles.

 

I bought a hydraulic jack at Walmart years ago and it's the best thing ever.

It's like a 17-year-old boy getting laid for the first time: Three pumps and it's done.