How to Jump-Start a Car

Video Transcript

"This is Richard Goms, we're here in Murray, Utah, we're talking about basic car care. I'm going to show you right now how to hook up two cars to jump start a battery. There may be a time when its really cold out or maybe your battery is going bad and you won't be able to start it and you're at the mall and you can somebody to come and jump start your battery. Everybody should have a pair of cables in their trunk and you take a pair of cables like this and you'll notice there is a red and a black. We have already hooked the red and black, other end of these cables to the car that has the good battery. The red usually goes on the positive side of the battery, the black usually goes on the negative side of the battery. And we're going to hook these two ends up to this battery to jump start it the same way. You never cross the wires, you always put red to positive and black to negative. There are exceptions, those exceptions would be mentioned in your manual. In this case, we're going to hook the red up first, we always hook the red up and then the black, it eliminates the possibility of having an explosion. Best situation is that this battery is not too dead and we just hook the two batteries together from the two cars and his car just starts right up. Now in the case where this battery is a little bit deader than that, I might have to start my car, let it run for a little while to charge this battery up a little bit, and then have him try and start his car. If the battery is worse than that, we may have to pull the battery out and take it some place and have it charged and then put it back in. But the best protection for your car, being the car that's jumping the other car, is to leave your car turned off so you don't run the risk of damaging your alternator. In this situation, I'm just going to hook the two batteries together which I've already done and he's going to try to start his car. My car is not running. And his car started right up. So now we need to disconnect it from the car once it starts, you disconnect it just the opposite of the way that you connected it. You disconnect the negative first, the black in this case, and then you disconnect the red and then you do the same thing to the other car."