Dead Battery No Crank Best Way to Jumpstart Your Car How to Do It and Why

Hey, buddy, can I get a jump? Hey, what's going on? Is your battery dead?

Hey friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. In this video, we're gonna go over how to safely jumpstart your vehicle and some things to think about along the way. Let's get started. Real quick before we get started, I wanted to touch on safety. You want hand and eye protection at all times any time you're dealing with your battery or on your vehicle in general. Now, if somebody came over and they asked me to jumpstart their vehicle, one of the first things that I would wanna do is to try to test the battery, to make sure that it's in good functioning order. Try to grab onto these terminal ends and just make sure that they're not lose in any way and they can't pivot. If these are loose, of course they're gonna have an issue and they might not be able to start the vehicle.

Something else to think about is the overall condition. If you see corrosion like this, that's kind of a telltale sign that there's gonna be a battery draw and it's a very potential cause of why the battery might've gone low in the first place. Something else that you wanna pay attention to is the manufacturer date of the battery itself. Overall, most times batteries are gonna last approximately five years, depending on your charging system and the amount of times that you use it, or the fluency that you use your vehicle. So, if you leave your vehicle sitting for a long period of time, maybe several days, weeks, even months, obviously the battery is gonna kind of drain down a little bit over time, especially if you have some corrosion like this, and it might potentially cause an issue.

If the battery level or charge goes down too much, then of course your vehicle's not gonna be able to start and you're gonna find that you have this issue. If you have access to a multimeter, it's a good idea to quickly test the voltage so you know what your starting point is here. So, I'm just gonna connect the positive to the positive, negative to the negative and we're gonna take a look at that voltage.

This battery is actually in good condition right here, so it wouldn't actually cause a potential slow start condition. But if your vehicle battery voltage is super low, like this one, obviously you're gonna be able to tell that you're gonna have a starting issue. A healthy battery should be between 12.4 and 12.6 volts. If you need more information about your battery health or how to test it, check out our link in the description below and that'll tell you about battery health.

Something to think about real quick, when it comes time to jump-starting your vehicle is the fact that you're gonna have different size engines and battery sizes inside of them. This truck right here has a V8 engine, and it's a big old engine, it takes a lot of energy/voltage to start it up. This one over here is a beautiful engine, it's highly fuel economic, but it's much smaller in general. So, with that said, it doesn't require as much voltage to be able to turn over and start. So, if you were to look at the batteries, you're probably gonna see a very big difference, and that brings us in to cold cranking amps.

So, let's come right over to the smaller vehicle here and I can see right on the battery, it says 525 cold cranking amps and 650 cranking amps. And that's at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. So now, looking at the larger vehicle here, we can see that our cranking amps is much higher and of course the cold cranking amps is higher as well.

With that said, if I was trying to jumpstart my truck, the V8, with a much smaller battery, it's gonna have a much harder time to try to start, right? Because that battery isn't gonna be able to put out as much cold cranking amps to help me out to start this vehicle. But if you think about it the other way around, this battery has much more cold tracking amps and it's gonna have a much easier time trying to start that smaller engine over there.

Okay. So now it's gonna be time to get our jumper cables, and it's good to have a nice set of jumper cables for just this type of situation. The way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna take one side of the wires, just like this, you have a red and a black. One's positive, one's ground. The red is gonna go to positive on the good known battery. Put it right on there so we're making great contact all the way across. Let's see if I can get it, perfect. Now, for the negative, I'm just gonna leave this hanging and I wanna keep it away from anything that is gonna create a contact with a negative terminal or even ground out to the vehicle.

Now let's continue on to the vehicle with the bad battery. We're gonna come right over here. I'm gonna connect the positive right on the positive lead. Try to get around that corrosion there. They're gonna have to clean that up. And now we're gonna leave the negative for the bad battery right over here, same thing, so it's not connected. Come back over to the good battery. We'll go ahead and connect this onto the terminal. Make sure we have good connection. That feels perfect.

Okay. So here we are back over at the vehicle with the bad battery. For this right here is where it kind of gets a little controversial. Some people will say connect it right to the negative battery terminal. I don't tend to lean that way. I prefer to go to a ground that's on the engine. So I'm gonna find something that looks like this. It's a nice metal mount right here. You know it's structurally integral and it's of course grounded. We'll connect it right on there. Give it a nice one wiggle, make sure that there's nothing in between there such as rust, or debris, or anything like that. That feels great.

Now, the reason why I decided to actually ground to the engine rather than going to the terminal itself is for a couple of different reasons. The first reason why I did that was because, as you can read right directly on the battery, inside of it, it has sulfuric acid. Also there could be explosive gases that are lingering around the vent area. So, of course, if I was to make a connection here and it arced or sparked, well, it's gonna be right near that and that's no good.

By connecting it to the ground right here on your engine, it ensures the fact that you have a proper ground between your engine and your battery. So, if you try to jump it like this now and it doesn't wanna start, that's kind of telling you that there's something going on with the ground. Also, by connecting it to a ground on the engine, it's gonna create a few circuits, so that way there you don't cause any damage to either of the vehicle's computers. Another reason for doing this is just in case the battery shorted out internally, you're not gonna have an issue where something explodes in your face.

So now that we have our cables properly hooked up, we're gonna go ahead and start up the vehicle. But one little thing that I did real quick is I put the multimeter right here on the battery so we can see what's going on. Like I said, yeah, we have an okay battery in this vehicle right now, but I wanna show you what happens when I actually start up the good known vehicle. Okay. So, we just started up the vehicle. We're coming over here, we're gonna look at this multimeter. What I can see is the voltage came right up. It's looking at approximately 14 volts. That's telling me that my alternator from my vehicle is coming right through these cables and it's charging this up slowly. All right. So I like to let the vehicle sit for maybe a minute just like this. And that's just gonna give the battery a little bit of charge. What I'm not trying to do is charge this whole battery with the good known battery/alternator of the other vehicle.

So, let's jump right in, we're gonna start it up, let it run for maybe a minute or so, and then we'll start disconnecting. Now, before we go ahead and try to start this vehicle though, we wanna make sure that everything's off as much as possible. So, go ahead and make sure your blower motor is gonna be in the off position. Make sure your wiper blades and of course your headlights are gonna be in the off position. Turn on the key and take a look, make sure that your radio is gonna be turned off as well. Essentially, anything that's gonna try to draw power, we wanna turn it off so all the power that we have is gonna go straight to that starter and start up our car.

Okay. So, we have the vehicle started now and I'm gonna look at this multimedia right here. This is looking real good. We're looking at approximately 14.36 right there. It looks great. So let's start disconnecting things here. So, we're gonna disconnect these in reverse order. I'm gonna start right here, take it right off of there. Now I'm gonna set it so there's no way that it can make contact with anything that's gonna ground it out. We're gonna move on over to our good known battery, we're gonna disconnect this is well.

Make sure you hold these apart. There we go. Okay. With having our multimeter still hooked up, we can look at this right here and I can tell that the alternator is still working, so that's good news. We wanna make sure that the alternator's working. That way there, we can take this for a nice drive and we're gonna charge up the battery and then we'll of course retest the battery with the multimeter when we're done.

So, let's talk about this real quick. Some people might say that it's a good idea to rev the engine on the good known vehicle while you're trying to jumpstart the vehicle with the low/dead battery. The reason why it doesn't make sense to me to rev the engine on the vehicle that I'm jumping with is because the alternator is not supposed to provide a big burst of power to the battery to actually start your vehicle. It's more just kind of like supposed to charge the battery once you start the vehicle.

We're not actually trying to charge the battery on the dead vehicle over here. All we're trying to do is to provide enough amperage and voltage to start the vehicle. Once it started, at that point, the vehicle's own alternator should be doing the job of charging the battery. The reason why we wanna start the engine on the vehicle we're gonna be jumping with is so that, as we draw power from this battery, we're not gonna draw too low that our vehicle won't wanna start in the long run also. So, if we have this one running, it's gonna be able to get charged up by the alternator at the same time as it's trying to help out the other person's battery on the other side.

Now, with the cables off and the vehicle running, essentially your car should be able to run using only the alternator. So, even if the battery was completely dead, you should be able to still drive down the road and potentially charge the battery. If for some reason when you disconnected those cables, the car turned immediately off and then it didn't wanna crank over again, more than likely you have an issue where the alternator isn't functioning the way it should, and it should be tested. Because if the alternator isn't putting out enough amperage to be able to charge your battery, you know you're gonna have an issue.

Maybe if the alternator's bad, you drove all the way to work just running off of your battery voltage, maybe it got you there somehow, and that's great. But by the time you parked it, you went inside, you did your thing, you come back out, you go to start it, now the battery voltage is too low to be able to start your vehicle. Something to think about is that the alternator's meant to charge your battery over the long-term. It's not gonna be a short-term thing. It's not just gonna pump in 500 amps all at once. It's gonna be much lower in amperage, pumping into that battery to slowly trickle charge it up. It's a good idea to immediately take your vehicle for a nice road test after you've actually jump-started the vehicle. That way there, your alternator continues doing its job for an extended period of time and charge up that battery.

To answer the question on whether or not it's a good idea to rev the engine on the good known battery so you can come over here to the dead battery and jumpstart it, it's not necessarily gonna be helpful. The reason why we're actually jump-starting in the vehicle is, like it says, we're jump-starting it, we're not trying to charge this battery. The alternator over there, yeah, it's gonna put out a little bit more amperage if you were to actually rev the engine, but it's not gonna be something that's gonna help this jumpstart in any way overall. Where all this power is coming from is from the battery not from the alternator.

Okay, friends. So, that's what I got for you on jump-starting your vehicle. Hopefully you learned a little something along the way. If you did and you wanna talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you like the video, smash on the like button for me, it'll mean the world. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell, that way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.