Hook up positive or negative first

How to Replace Your Car Battery - autoevolution

If the vehicle starts, continue to Step Drive the vehicle with the previously dead battery for about half an hour to recharge it before turning the engine off. So you've cranked your ignition, and instead of your car firing up and raring to take you to your next destination, all it does is make a rapid clicking sound, or perhaps no sound at all. Looks like you've got yourself a dead battery.


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If you've got a set of jumper cables in your trunk and another operable vehicle nearby, you can be back on the road in less than 10 minutes -- even less if you carry one of those portable jump-starters with you. Typically your battery is under your hood, but sometimes it can be in the trunk, or even under the floor of the passenger compartment.

How to Jump a Car Battery

If you open your hood and there's no battery to be found, consult your owner's manual. Once you've located your car's or truck's battery, identify the positive and negative terminals. Some auto manufacturers go the extra mile and color-coordinate battery terminal connection points with red for the positive side and black for the negative side. Once you've identified your battery's positive and negative terminals, do the same for the operable vehicle you're using to jump-start your car. Once you've done that, it's time to start making connections.

It's essential to your safety that you clamp onto a piece of bare metal as opposed to the dead battery's negative terminal.

How to jump-start your car

With the operable vehicle switched off, begin the connection process by attaching a red cable clamp to your dead car's positive terminal. As long as any part of your jumper cables are connected to a power source, ensure the cable clamps never touch one another. This could provoke sparking that could increase the risk of a fire. Walk over to the operable vehicle and connect the other red clamp to that battery's positive terminal.

Hooking up the Battery Charger

While you're there, go ahead and attach the black clamp to the negative terminal. Keep in mind that it's quite heavy and you wouldn't want to drop on your feet or on other people's feet. If you are installing a new battery, all you have to do with the old one is to take it to an authorized center for recycling.

If, however, you are planning a thorough recharge process, you can take the opportunity and clean the terminals with a wire brush. You can do the same with the cables themselves. After all of this is done, it's now time to put the new battery or the old, albeit recharged, battery back into place. As you might or might not guess, you will have to wire everything in reverse order. So, after placing the battery in its place and securing it, first attach the positive cable and then the negative one.

How to Disconnect a Car Battery

A nice finishing touch would be to smear some special grease over the terminals to prevent future corrosion. And you're all done. Now all you have to do is start the engine just to make sure everything is ok. Positive first, and negative last. It is a shame the instructions in the link didn't say why they should be done in that order. Ah yes, I got them the wrong way round in my question Should say "positive lead first" dammit.

For technical functioning it does not matter in which order you connect them. However for safety reasons it does matter. Whole car except a few parts like the positive pole are connected. Any mistake with the other lead will lead to a short. You really do not want this. Depending on your point of view and your desire to prevent harm. Hennes Hennes 4 It does matter which you connect last which HandyHowie points out in his answer. This is true of any negatively grounded earthed vehicle, which is the vast majority of vehicles on the road today.

Besides accidentally hitting the car body when tightening the bolt on the positive lead? Everything you wrote is correct. The rule is just for safety, as you wrote in your last point.