How to Change a Car's Battery

Video Transcript

"I'm Richard Goms, we're here in Murray, Utah, we're talking about basic car care. I'm going to show you at this time how to change a battery. First of all you can see that this battery is quite corroded, the terminals are quite corroded. First of all we're going to want to clean the terminals before we start changing anything. I've got a spray battery cleaner and this you can use to spray right on the terminals and it will eat that corrosion right off of there. And once that sits for a few minutes, I'm going to wash that off with water and it will be nice and clean. This is just plain water in this antifreeze container and I'm just going to use this to wash this off. Actually I think I'm going to use a wire brush on it to try and get the rest of it off. Well the wire brush is taking off quite a bit of the corrosion, but it looks like I may have to spray it again to get the rest of it off because there is still a lot of green corrosion there. Now that the battery terminals are fairly clean, we can disconnect the battery terminals on both sides. The negative terminal is on this side, the positive terminal's on this side on this battery. We want to disconnect the negative terminal on this battery and in order to do that, we have to use a wrench, loosen the bolt and then pull straight up to disconnect. Now that the negative being disconnected now we can do the positive. If you do it the other way around, you run the risk of touching the wrench unless its coated with plastic, touching the wrench to a piece of metal which would cause a spark. So right now we're going to disconnect the positive terminal and take that off as well. Now you can see that the terminals have been with the spray cleaner have been fairly well cleaned. There's only one more thing we need to do to pull this battery out and that is we need to disconnect the clamp that holds the battery in to keep it from joggling around inside the battery box. So what we will do, we will use the socket and we will disconnect the clamp, loosen the clamp. And in this case, we'll need to take the clamp out and then we can remove the battery. Since this battery is still good and really doesn't need to be replaced, we will, I'll go ahead and put it back in and show you how to connect up the new battery. OK, now we will put the new battery down inside the battery box, make sure its seated well and then we'll have to put the clamp back on and bolt it down nice and tight. Make sure the clamp is pushed up against the battery and the battery is pushed as far back against the battery box as you can. Now we will do everything just in reverse. We will put the positive side on first on this battery and of course these vary because batteries have top terminals, they have side mount terminals and sometimes the terminals are reversed so positive would be in the front and the negative would be in the back. But let's connect the positive first so we don't electrocute ourselves. And then we will connect the negative terminal. OK, and now we've finished changing the battery."