Hey guys Chrisfix Here. Today I'm going to teach you the proper way to jumpstart your car if your battery's dead. It's happened to all of us, you leave your headlights on, your battery just drains for some reason, and you need a jump. In my 95 Ford Windstar the battery is dead, Just 'cause it's seven years old it's pretty old, batteries last about four years on average. (Engine turning over slowly) As you could hear, it won't start, so I'm going to show you how to safely and properly jump a car. So the first step Is get a car that runs and pull it up to the car with the dead battery, so the jumper cables could reach both batteries. You want to make sure that both cars are separated and don't touch each other when you do this. You also want to make sure that you take the keys out of the ignition for both vehicles. For each of our vehicles you want to find the battery and find where the positive and negative leads are. This is my truck battery, this is the battery that works. So here's the positive, it's Red, and then here's the negative, it's Black. Now if we go over to our van which is not starting, we can look at the battery, And you can see right here, Black cable, that's our negative, and then this one is our positive, it's our Red cable. So, once you identify that, we could begin. Now you're gonna want to take your jumper cables and spread them out, so you have one Red one Black in each hand, and just detangle the wires Here's the dead battery in our van, and we'll take out the jumper cables. From this point forward, we don't want the jumper cable ends to touch each other. The first thing we're going to do is take the one side of the jumper cables, We're going to get our Red, which is our Positive, and we're going to attach it to the positive side of the dead battery. You want to make sure you get a good connection right on that battery post. You can see that these copper pieces are touching the metal on the post, and there's a good connection. If you want you could wiggle it around a little bit just to make sure you get it in there good. The reason why you touch the Red cable to the dead battery first is because the dead battery doesn't have as much energy as the good battery, so starting here is the safest. You could take your ground and just put it on a piece of plastic. You don't want your ground touching any bare metal, 'cause then you'll be grounding it out. You could just leave it there for now, we're gonna connect it to the battery in a second. Now we're gonna go over to the good battery. We're gonna grab both of our leads just like we did before, don't touch them together. We're going to take our Red one and put it on the positive terminal, which is also Red. At the good battery we're gonna get our black lead, and we're gonna attach it to our negative side here. So we'll attach this here. Now we have the Black lead and the Red lead on the good battery attached. Back at the dead battery, this is the last lead we have to attach, but you aren't going to attach it to the negative battery terminal. Touching the lead to the negative battery terminal will cause a spark, and these sparks can ignite any fumes from the battery, and cause an explosion. Batteries could create hydrogen gas, especially when they're run down and not working properly, and hydrogen gas Is explosive, so to play it safe, just find another grounding point. Some cars have a ground spot away from the battery specifically for jumping your car, so check your owner's manual. If not, find a bare piece of metal for a ground, that isn't a moving part, and that isn't attached to an electrical component. So when looking for a ground, you want to try to find something that's bare metal If we look here, there's a nice ground here, but unfortunately this wire is pretty thin, so if you don't have a good connection to this ground, this wire is thin, so you could actually melt it. A good spot to look is on the engine. When we're looking at the engine here, here's a nice bear piece of metal, my only problem with this bear piece of metal is that it's right next to the fuel pressure regulator, and we're trying to avoid sparks next to anything flammable, so this isn't a spot that I would want to use. But it's nice because it's a nice thick piece of metal, it's bare metal, it's directly connected to the engine, so you get a good ground. In my case what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go find the Strut tower. And as you can see on my strut tower, there's a bunch of good bolts that provide a good ground, and they're also bare metal, so we're going to attach it to that. The other good thing is, this strut tower's away from the battery, so we don't have to worry about sparks. But there's tons of grounds that you could use, in this case this is just one of them. Just get in here and clamp right down onto that, and make sure you have a good connection. So with our cables all set up one last thing you want to do is you want to inspect to make sure that these cables are not near any cooling fans, you can see our cooling fans are over here, so we don't have to worry about that, and our serpentine belt is on the other side so we don't have to worry about that. Now that our cables are clear let's check out the other side. Moving to the good battery side the fan is right here as well as the serpentine belt, and our cables are out of the way over here, so we're ready to jump the vehicle. Now we're gonna start the engine on my truck which is the good battery, and let it run for two minutes. (Truck running) My trucks been running for about two minutes so we're going to start the engine in my van. Hopefully it'll start up. (Van starting) There we go. Now right away, You want to go and take off the negative terminal first. And now if I take this off and it sparks, it's away from the battery which is being charged, and potentially creating hydrogen gas. If we took off the Red terminal first, we could create a spark right here, which is on top of the battery which wouldn't be good. So we'll remove the negative terminal first, don't let this touch anything, and then we'll remove our positive terminal on the bad battery. Make sure these don't touch. Then you remove the Red cable, and then the Black cable. And now your car is started so you're not stranded anymore. So let's just give a scenario where you go to start your car, and it doesn't work. It slowly drags, but you don't get the car started. Let the car sit for another five minutes, Let that other car that's running charge up your battery. Essentially the alternator in the other car is charging your battery, so, sit for five more minutes, take the key out of the ignition, and then in five minutes try starting it again. If it seems like you're really close to starting, but you just need a little bit more juice Have that person in the car with the good battery rev up the engine to about 2,000 Rpms, and hold it there as you try to start the vehicle with the dead battery. This will get the alternator spinning faster so you'll have more power to start the car with the bad battery. After all that if all you get is a click, and you can't start your engine, your battery could be permanently bad, there could be a bad cell in there, it could be shorted internally, but before you give up, make sure that you have a good connection on both the positive and negative terminals. Make sure you check the connections on the bad battery, as well as the good battery. Another thing to do, is if you attach it to this ground, and it won't start the car, try connecting it to a better ground. A lot of times switching to another ground will start the car Hopefully this video taught you how to properly jump your car If the video is helpful, remember to give it a thumbs up. Also consider subscribing. The top tip for this video is. What if you're using one of these portable jumpers? These portable jumpers are great to have in your car, and they're really easy to use. Plus you don't have to rely on anybody to be there to help you jump your car you could do it yourself. With one of these jumpers all you have to do is make sure that's in the off position. Take your red jumper cable, connect it to the positive terminal, and then your black jumper cable could actually connect directly to the battery. There's no need to connect it to a separate ground like when we did when we jumped the car. Because there's an on/off switch there's no electrical current going through these jumpers. If you really wanted to you could touch the two jumpers together and nothing will happen. So when we're connecting the black lead to the negative terminal, there's no sparks at all, so we can connect directly to the battery's negative terminal. Now all we have to do is turn it to the on position, and we'll go start the car. (Car starting) She started right up, right away just switch this off, and then you can just disconnect both of the jumper cables, and you're good to go.
This is a very comprehensive video. There are an abundance of safety measures included. I would add the following factoid. Notice that in the beginning the engine turned over reasonably well, but it did not start. A low battery will still turn the engine over. However, modern electronics have a minimum cutoff voltage that will not power the coils, injectors and so forth.