How to jump start a car | Dad, how do I?

hey kids so mom calls me and says honey the van won't start do you think you can jump it and i thought well i think if i had a running start i could probably get over the car but i don't think i can get over the van so anyway i'm right here uh at the van trying to give it a shot to start and let's see sure enough there's nothing so we're gonna go uh pop the hood and then i'll just show you what what we look for next and how we how we jump a car all right okay so the first thing we want to look at unless if if you left your lights on and you know it should your battery just needs to be charged um but if there was nothing that you weren't sure what exactly happened then really you just want to look at the at the connections right so it could be because a lot of times if you don't pay attention to your engine these connections can be horrible okay mine are pretty clean and i i'm pretty sure actually in my case my battery is just the its life has just run out but as you can see my connections are good there's no corrosion here but a lot of times when you lift this up there'll be a lot of corrosion and that's what this tool is for okay it uh this cleans the post you just stick it on the post and twist it around and then this fits up inside that connector to clean that out so that's one thing to look for okay so now you want to make sure you have a good set of jumper cables okay that's where you start because you can these are these can be pretty cheap if you if you go too cheap on them you just want to make sure you got a thick gauge make sure it's good a lot of times those safety uh those car safety kits they come with really cheap jumper cables so i would say you might want to just put together your own kit and make sure you get a good set of jumper cables inside there okay okay so we're at the dead battery right that's where we start and an easy way to remember this is red dead so we're going to connect the red to the red on the dead battery okay um but before you even do that you want to look for a place that you're going to put the black one that's a ground you would think it would go here but that's actually what everybody's scared of because that can cause a spark when you actually connect that if you connected it to here i used to do that when i was younger i never had a problem but just for safety reasons we want to connect the black to a ground um in newer vehicles i think there's an obvious place where a ground is but you want an unpainted uh surface that is a ground and to be honest with you the best one i'm seeing is this right that little nut right there is a ground that i'm going to use okay so we're going to go ahead and connect we'll just leave the black set off to the side if you have a helper this makes it a little easier but i'm trying to show you what it looks like doing it by yourself if you have to do it by yourself so okay so we want to set this off to the side and we want to connect the red to the dead okay this battery is dead there's really nothing going on this is just sitting here okay we're going to go over to the other car the car with the good battery and i'll show you what we do there okay so now we're at the the car with the good battery and we go ahead and connect those and we connect the red to the red terminal okay and you can just put it right on right on there that's good and make sure that this is clean too right so we're getting good connections make sure you get a good connection so that's that okay now we're gonna go back to the dead battery okay so now we're back at the dead vehicle's battery and like i said you'd think you'd connect it there to the negative but you're actually not because there can cause a spark and if something if there's some gases it could cause yeah i mean i when i was younger i uh i always did it that way never had a problem so odds are you'd be safe but just for pure safety reasons this is the step that everybody's scared of you want to connect this to that ground that we talked about okay so right here we're connecting it to that make sure you get a good connection okay so now we're gonna go back to the the good car battery and start the engine okay so we're back in the car with the good battery we're just gonna go ahead and start it up okay okay and so depending on how uh how dead that other battery is you might need to let this run for a couple minutes and you can even especially if you're working with two people uh you could they could rev the engine while you go ahead and try to start that other car okay and then also when you're in this car make sure everything's off no heater no uh radio nothing we just want to have it all the juice going to the to the dead uh batteries or the dead car's battery okay okay so we're back in the van the one with the dead battery and we're just gonna go ahead and give it a shot that uh the other car's been running for about a minute or two and we're just gonna go ahead and give it a shot okay oh it didn't start the first time let's try it again there we go it's running okay so in my case the i think my battery is just uh over its lifespan they usually last depends on the the quality of the battery anywhere from six to 12 years really depends um so i think my battery is actually just dead and not going to hold a charge but what you would normally do if you just left your lights on and you know that it was just that and that's why the battery was dead now you would want to drive around you know drive your vehicle for 10-15 minutes and then you know don't go too far in case you have to if if you park somewhere then you may need to jump again right so just be smart about that drive around for like 10 or 15 minutes come back to where you have a good vehicle and then and then you can go ahead and turn it off and see if it starts back up okay so now that this is running um i'm gonna go ahead and show you how to take the cables back off because you got to do that now right basically all you're doing is doing it exactly the opposite of how we put them on okay so let's go do that okay so now we're just gonna remove everything just the opposite of we did before okay so you're gonna remove this okay we took that off and really uh you could just go ahead and remove this right now if you wanted to the only tricky part is you just want to make sure that the ends don't touch so just to be safe we're just going to set this here and you just want to set it somewhere where it's not sitting on anything metal again if this is by if you're doing it by yourself you're doing it with somebody else it's pretty easy to do this right because then you could just hold the cables you could remove that they just hold the cables apart while you remove the other ones but just for safety we're gonna go back over to the other vehicle and remove those okay so we're back at the good vehicle battery and we're just gonna remove it like i said just the exact opposite of we put things on we're taking off the negative now nothing's gonna spark right there's nothing the two just the two reds are connected but then just remove that okay now there's nothing there's no spark because that thing's only connected to the red on the other side so nothing to be scared of there okay let's go back over to the other vehicle okay so this is the last step we're just pulling this red off of here right we want to remove that and then actually i didn't put that other cap back on on the positive you always want to put that back on we'll do that on the other one um and i'll just go back and do that real quick so you can see okay so i should have done this when i removed the cables but i didn't so just to make sure you don't miss this step make sure when you go ahead and remove the cables from the good car that you put it back how it was when you started so if we look down here right this cap just needs to go back on top of here because that protects the corrosion and you just want to make sure that that's that's uh gonna stay good for a long time for you okay so that's about it um i think it's it's pretty simple but i i'm gonna drive my van around for a little while and see if it holds a charge and if it doesn't then probably my next video might be me changing my battery out for you all right thank you uh you got this and i'm proud of you

Channel: Dad, how do I?

Views: 540,848

Rating: 4.9910026 out of 5

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Id: z0QZNrX8fxI

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020