Jumper cables

Every car driver will eventually end up with a flat battery. A bad battery, leaving the lights on, not having used the car for a while, etc.  A problem which can be solved with jumper cables. But jumper cables are not always as straight forward as we think. There are plenty of low quality cables and there are plenty of people whom don’t know how to connect the leads.

Thick cables are usually better. A thicker cables generally means a higher capacity. If you use a cable with not enough capacity, you won’t be able to crank the car and the cables can get hot (in worse case melt and short out the battery). However thickness of the cables can hide a few facts.

•           Some company’s uses a thick insulator, making it appear thicker than it actually is.
•           While jumper cables used to be all copper, there are now three kind of materials used for jumper cables; solid copper, solid aluminum,  and copper coated aluminum cables.  Copper is a far better conductor than aluminum, more flexible and unlike aluminum it won’t corrode. This means aluminum cables appear to be thicker (or are just as thick, but have less capacity) . Most company do not specify which kind of cables are used. However aluminum is much lighter, so you can feel the weight difference.

Good cables however are not enough. You also need proper clamps to get all the electricity from a to b. There should be maximum contact between the clamps and the battery leads. The best clamps have both sides of the clamps connected to the cable to provide maximum contact. The safest clamps are the ones with full insolation on the outside (prevents shorting while  you are connecting them).

Surge protection

Most modern cars are far more sensitive to power surges. A risk when using jumper cables. There are lots of opinions what method is best to prevent this (and some say it doesn’t matter). There are jumper cables with build in surge protection which can prevent this. They are a bit more expensive.  If you do not have such jumper cables, but do have regular cables, there are aftermarket surge protectors which can be added on existing cables.

Smart cables

One manufacture (but sold under various brand names) makes ‘Smart’ jumper cables. You can hook the clamps to any battery leads and the little box in the middle will check the polarity and connect the proper cable’s to each other. This idea appears to be nice for people whom are not sure how to connect the cables. However the 12 gauge copper coated aluminum cables are too thin and the little box also requires some power from the battery to work, so it won’t work on totally flat batteries.( I have not seen a thicker cables version yet).

Instructions

You will not believe how little people know about using jumper cables,  so add instructions to your jumper cables. Shorting a battery out can be very dangerous (and expensive). Just having a piece of paper in the same package might not be obvious enough. One thing I made are the instructions cut in to strips and attached to each end of the cable.