How to Charge a Car Battery

Video Transcript

"Good afternoon, my name is Tom Brintzenhofe, certified master mechanic from Redding, Pennsylvania and today I'm going to talk briefly about how to charge your car's battery. We just had this new battery installed here but we want to make sure it's got a full charge on it. You want to get your battery charger, get yourself all hooked up. Just remember your negative, positive, positive is red, negative is black. Same thing on your battery. If you can't see, same color code on your wires here on your battery, just look on your battery and make sure you have a plus for positive, negative symbol for negative. Hook your positive up first for safety reasons. You want to hook your negative up last. Plug your battery charger in. It will probably take a couple hours to change it up if it's completely dead. This battery it's fairly brand new so it's not going to take that long but you want to charge this thing up till it gets about 12.5 to 12.6 is about a full charge. Take two to three hours on a dead battery to charge it up, it's really not that difficult. Your little meter up there will tell you when it's charged, fully charged. You have your red for charging and your blue for charged. Every battery charger is a little different so consult you need to consult your the manual that comes along with it, but it's really that simple. A couple hours charge yourself up. Remember 12.5 volts is where you want to be. And that's basically how you charge a car battery."