A professional race-car driver shares her tips on the safest method for jump-starting and maintaining a car.
- It can happen to anyone. You left your headlights on, it's the middle of winter, and now your car is dead. Everyone thinks they know what to do, but when the pressure's on, it's easy to forget. Here's what to do, according to professional race-car driver Pat Lazzaro.
- Always keep a pair of jumper cables in each car.
- Jumper cables differ in the gauge and composition of the cables. The best are solid copper--the heavier gauge the better. The lower the gauge number, the thicker the cable.
Safety Precautions
- Do not smoke, light a match or create a spark near a battery.
- Make sure to identify with 100-percent certainty where the positive and negative posts are on both batteries before attempting to jump-start car.
- Turn off both vehicles completely, and remove the keys from the ignitions. There should be NO current flowing at all when connecting jumper cables.
- Make sure the cars are not touching and that both car’s parking brakes are engaged.
- Do not stand in water.
- Make sure that the ends of the jumper cable ends never touch each other.
The process
- First, connect both the positive (red) ends of the jumper cables to the (+) charger on the dead battery and the charger's battery.
- Next, connect the negative (black) cable ends of the jumper cable to the (-) charger on the dead battery and to the other battery. Do not make the final jumper connection to the low or dead battery itself, it could produce a spark. Instead, clamp it onto a metal part to ground it.
- Turn on the host's car, and let it idle.
- Once the car starts, remove the cables in the same order as you placed them.
- Let the car idle for 15 minutes to recharge the battery. You may have heard that it's necessary to drive around to recharge it, but letting it idle is all that's necessary.
Preventative maintenance for the battery
- To remove corrosion: While wearing rubber gloves, apply a tablespoon of baking soda to the contact posts. Scrub with an old toothbrush and rinse with water.
- To prevent corrosion: Apply a small amount of petroleum jelly on the cable contact posts.
- Glue a penny on top of the battery, away from the contacts. The corrosion will be drawn to the penny and will keep the contact posts clean.
- Some batteries have a charge indicator on top of the battery. A light tells you that the battery is charged. No light means no charge. Most battery-condition indicators have a label on the battery that informs you how to interpret them.
