Flat battery

[cjwatson]

Does anyone have experience with jump-starting cars, and would anyone around Cambridge be willing to help me do so tonight or tomorrow morning? I have the full set of cables and stuff, although random googling suggests I ought to be looking for goggles too. I'll owe you a drink or three ...

Comments

Dangerous?

[(Anonymous)]

Dangerous? You great wimp, it's only a 12V battery :-)

If you connect them up in the wrong order then apparently it might bleed a load of charge off the working car into some kind of black hole and both batteries go flat or something. If you connect them in the right order then it doesn't do that. But it's dead easy; connect the batteries in the right order (your leads are right), then have someone sit in the working car with the engine on and rev it, and then you sit in your flat car and start it. Lots of accelerator. Once it's running on its own, disconnect the leads in the right order, leave yours running for a bit, and then off to wherever you're going; as terry says, you should really take it for a reasonable drive so that the alternator gets a chance to charge your battery up again.

sil

Re: Dangerous?

[sarabian.livejournal.com]

Certainly isn't dangerous :)

It's something I've done many times over the past few years after being too tight fisted to replace the battery and then :-
a) leaving lights on overnight
b) having children turning lights on and not noticing
c) having the wife leave the lights on for about an hour
d) failing to start the car in the required 30 seconds before the battery went flat.

I got a new battery after d.