 Earl Glanchop, former here at Township Chevrolet from the addition to Tech Talk and we're kind of in our how-to segment kind of simple things you guys can do at home or if you're stuck on the side of the road so today we're going to go over boosting a vehicle so it's kind of one of those things that kind of makes people nervous and there's definitely a right way and a wrong way to do it and if you do it the wrong way you can cause yourself a lot of heartache and a lot of damages so we got a couple of vehicles here we're going to show you the proper way to boost it with a set of cables also with a booster pack if you're lucky enough to have one of those you get them online now pretty cheap they're really kind of a small hand-held kind of deal something you plug in your cigarette lighter charges when you're driving once it's charged up you unplug it throw it in the trunk and then if you ever need it choose a good for a couple of starts it's another way to boost yourself without having to rely on someone else's vehicle and it's also probably a safer way to do it but if you're stuck we're going to go through the cables way to boost a vehicle and we've got two in here so we're going to go ahead and show you how to do that okay so you come out to your car first thing in the morning really cold morning maybe the battery's getting weak or you left the lights on or you left the door open or whatever the case may be come out of the mall and your car won't start and you think it's a dead battery easiest way to tell is usually they'll have gauges will be fluctuating you'll have a lot of sweeping of the gauges radio may be coming kind of flashing on and off flickering you may hear a bunch of relays clicking and when you go to crank the car over or you press the start button you'll actually hear like a heavy click click click click the noise that's usually a sure sign that you've got a dead battery so we're going to do the booster pack way first kind of the easiest thing to do so one of the things you want to do is when you're either hooking up booster pack or cables you want to hook up your positive first usually the positive will be a red cable or a red cover or something the battery will almost always have or the cover will have a positive and negative sign now that's a good example because this vehicle had a red cover over top of the positive cable here and over time someone's broken it's come off of there it's not there anymore so now you're dealing with two black cables which one's positive which one's negative so you're going to check look at the battery here and you'll have a positive sign on the battery now this one obviously it's covered up here so this cover here does come off of this car so I'm going to go ahead and pull it off oh and if you look there's your red cable and we know we're into a positive side feeds all the fuses so this is the positive side in this battery um this is the negative side for uh for the chev owners if you look down here Phil you'll see this is your amp clamp which is on the negative side of the batteries is that little circle thing with the with this going to it which is on the negative side so that's another sure way to tell too so colors definitely the way to go kind of makes it simple this is red red to red you're good to go so we're going to go ahead and make sure we're clamped on the cable very well now one thing you want to do is if the battery's going dead for whether it be an under charge situation or maybe it was overcharged and it was boiled there is gases in some of these batteries that can cause an explosion if if you you know have sparks so a couple of things you want to do make sure the key in the vehicle shut off before you hook up the cables your heater and all that stuff is off your lights are off anything else you may have turned on you want as little of load as you possibly can another smart thing to do is to is have the window rolled down with the keys either either in it or take the keys out with the window up so sometimes what'll happen is when these body control modules and computers that control your interior functions like your your door locks sometimes when they get that shock of electricity when you hook up the booster pack or the other vehicle i've seen them lock the doors before so just something to keep in mind either keep the keys in your pocket or roll your window down one or the other the best spot to put the ground is somewhere other than the battery if you can so you're going to go on to go to something heavy something metal on the engine block some vehicles in the strut towers will have a grounds location you can see this car has one here but unfortunately it's so close to the battery you might as well just jump off of the battery if you have to so to try to avoid sparks close to the battery we're going to hook it somewhere else metal so if you look here there's these two hooks they're fastened right to the engine block there's ground cables that go from the engine block to the body and from the body to the battery so when we hook this up here this is essentially the same as hooking it to the battery so you'll see you can see it's fairly rusty in there phil and the better you the cleaner it is the better the connection so sometimes what you do is we just open these up because you mean you can be doing this on the side of the road or just rub it up and down a few times and that'll kind of clean the rust out of the area jump in the vehicle and give it a start once the car is running uh i like to leave the cables hooked up just for a minute you don't want to put too much of a load on the alternator trying to charge that battery that's gone completely stone dead so in this case booster packs great if someone's boosting the obviously and they're in a rush you can't make them wait around so you're kind of you're kind of stuck where you are so but if you can i like to leave this on for a few minutes sometimes you'll actually hear the alternator kind of a heavier wine noise that maybe you're not used to hearing and that could because the alternator's working overtime trying to charge that battery up uh the nice thing about that that that amp clamp that i showed you that's on the negative cable on this battery a lot of the newer vehicles i know the chev's do for sure and a lot of the other other manufacturers have a battery saver mode so what that means is while this battery is at a low state of health uh the car will actually shut off some accessories that you don't need like maybe you're when you get jumped in your car and you start driving the road you notice your rear defoggers not working or your heated mirrors not working or even your heater fans not going full speed like it used to that's because the the car the computers in the car are saying okay this battery is in bad shape uh we're going to focus on charging that up right now so we're going to shut off some of the stuff that you don't need obviously it's going to leave your headlights your wipers on all that kind of stuff that's safety related uh and it might dial back some of the stuff that's not so important so just something to keep in mind once you get it boosted it may take a little while for the car to kind of act normal and for all your accessories and stuff to work so once that's done obviously you're going to put the covers back on uh and you're going to close your hood and you're down the road so in my opinion the best thing to do would be if this is the vehicle that is uh that's running okay and this is the one that starts finding this one you're getting the boost from uh I like to start the vehicle up and have it running uh while you're boosting everything that way you're not putting a load from both cars on that one battery so I'm going to shut it off but we're going to assume at this point that this thing is running so you're going to start the vehicle uh same thing I like to roll the windows down that way we're not into uh doors locking just in case something was to ever ever go wrong and there's the order in how you're going to do this pretty simple so a lot of guys will go ahead and they'll put the cables on one side then you've got positive negative they're live if they touch together they're shortened out um what I like to do is I like to take the cables and clamp the cable on itself so it's less chance of it to touch they're not running close together so you're going to go ahead and you're going to do red you can see this vehicle here same thing this caravan it's got the red cable it's got the black cable over here and the red cable here you can see it down there on top of the battery you can actually see a positive sign there fill in if you can get in to see that one it actually has positive there and it's negative on that side so we're going to go ahead and we're going to put on the positive cable first on that end and then we're going to come over to this car and we're going to put the positive side on this one so you got both positives hooked up no negatives then you're going to go back to the the other car you're getting the boost from and you're going to put the negative on there then you're going to come back to this car the car that needs the boost and you're going to do the same thing and put it on the engine ground and try to stay away from the battery so that's how you're going to properly hook it up you're going to come over here van's already running now we've got the car running so at this point I like to let both cars run and I just take it off in the reverse order so what I usually do is you'll pull this one off of here I like to clamp it on here again so it can't get up and touch anywhere you're going to pull the negative off this side and now you're okay to pull positive come over to this car pull the positive and both are done same thing if the person's not in a rush or it's a family member or someone you know that's giving you the boost just leave the vehicle hooked up for a few minutes just to let it kind of help charge the battery so it's kind of getting charged from both alternators have as little of a load as you can on this like obviously if someone's boosting you if they've got their heater on they're this thing's got front and rear heat both of them are on the heated seats are on the wipers are going the headlights are on turn as many accessories off of the vehicle you're boosting from it's just easier on that vehicle's charging system and you don't have to worry about you know causing this guy any headaches down the road either so that's the gist of a boost and then what you'll do is obviously if if the battery's gone dead it's for a reason either a there was a there's a draw in the batteries just something is staying on whether it's something you left on or there's an issue or a short somewhere in the car that's out of your control the car is keeping on in itself or the battery itself is getting weak or the charging system is not working properly now normally if your charging system is the issue that's usually a car will quit so if you've got an alternator that's gone bad your car will run off the battery until the battery is dead then the car will quit if you've got a battery that's bad and you boost it you start it essentially you could drive from here to Vancouver if you never had to shut the car off and it would run solely off the alternator itself so if you've got a battery that's getting weaker going dead there is a way to test that and we do have testers here most shops have them we put put the tester across there press a few buttons we tell it what kind of battery it is uh whether it's a flooded or a gm and then it we put the cold cranking amps of the battery in and then it'll come back and it'll do a read it and tell us if it's because there's two things it's looking for it's looking for voltage and it's looking for amperage so voltage is obviously the voltage in the battery and amperage is the ability to push that voltage to the things that needs to go so you got to have both to kind of to make the battery work properly so uh it's not a not a big deal to take a battery test it's only a few minutes on most machines and that'll tell you if you need a battery or not or whether and most of those battery testers will test the charging and start starting system at the same time so if you've boosted your car and it's running fine and you know okay I see that I let the dome light on then obviously wait till the next time you give it a start uh once you've got it started you're gonna probably want to let it run for at least 10 or 15 minutes to kind of charge that battery up again if your car's got a gauge in it great perfect let that gauge go up to where it should be which is anywhere from 12 volts to 15 volts depending on what the alternator's demanding to charge the battery on any of these ones with the amp clamp the alternator's controlled by the computer so after it's dead you're going to see that really high probably 15 amps and once it starts to come down around 14 volts that's usually a good sign that the battery is charged up and it it's okay to shut it off again so um yeah those are kind of uh kind of quick tips on how to how to how to boost the car and obviously if uh it continues to happen there's obviously a problem you should bring it in and get it checked out so that's been boosting a battery if there's any any questions anyone has drop in the comments below hit the subscribe button hit the like button uh we want to put lots of content out there for you guys any suggestions you guys have anything you want to know about car related or anything you want to learn about car related just drop it in the comments below and we'll do our best to get that get that on there for you another edition of tech talk and we look forward to seeing you