Picture this: you are late for an important meeting, date, event or even party. You quickly jump into your car, turn the key and click-click-click nothing. Your battery is dead. What do you do? You need to jump start the car. To do this, you will need another car that is running and a pair of jumper cables, then follow these simple steps:
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- Bring the running car close to yours, either parallel park them or facing each other. Switch off both engines.
- Use the red jump lead to connect the positive terminal of your dead battery to the positive terminal of the other car’s battery.
- Use the black jump lead to connect the negative terminal of the other car’s battery to a metallic surface on your car.
- Start the other car and let it run for a couple of minutes.
- Start your car. If it still does not start, give it a minute for the battery to charge some more and start again.
- Carefully disconnect the cables in the order you connected them: negative from your car, negative from the other car, positive from your car, positive from the other car.
- Keep your car running even after you have reached your destination to give your battery time to be recharged by the engine.
For your safety:
- When connecting the positive terminals, start with your dead battery first.
- Never touch the ends of red and black jump leads together, this could create sparks and damage both of the cars.
- Do not jump start the car if the battery looks damaged, corroded, cracked, dry, leaking or frozen.
