Jump Starting a Car Battery in the 21st Century

Boy, back in my father’s day, jump-starting a car was scary.

First you had to find someone else willing to let you borrow their car for the donor battery. Then there was a very specific, exact way to attach, ground and un-attach the cables or else your car would blow up, from what I remember.

All that’s gone now, thankfully. Jump Starting a Car Battery is pretty much as easy as charging your electronic devices. In fact, you can use the same thing to charge your electronic devices as you do to jump a dead car battery.

Pocket Jump Starters

One of the better investments you can make, friend, is to get a portable pocket jump starter. We’re not talking those boxy things bigger than your car battery itself, we mean something that’s about the size of a paperback novel, or a small box of chocolates. You can get them at Walmart, Home Depot, online for anywhere from $200 to $50, with something perfectly adequate for around a hundred bucks.

If you get a Big Bertha Car Battery Jump Pack, they generally offer air compression as well, which is really the only advantage we can see.

Small but Powerful

For jumping a car battery the pocket-sized ones are what you want. Honestly. Forget all the mucking around with some other poor slob’s car, parking it close enough to attach the always just a bit short cables, trying to remember “Red to… positive? Negative? Ground?” You don’t want you or those you love to have to depend on the kindness of strangers.

In about the $99 range you should be able to get one that can jump a standard 3-liter engine. Surge protection’s expected, but check anyway. They should have 12 volt output ports, with something in the neighborhood of 12000mAh capacity.

Multiple Jumping a Car Battery for Many Devices

Any decent one can do multiple jumps off one charge. You can jump start a boat off these things — and then charge up your daughter’s iPhone on the same device. Is America the best or what?

Yeah, you don’t look quite as manly whipping out something that looks like a computer storage device, clipping it on and saying “Fire her up.” Watching my dad confidently hook up the cables, knowing in my nine-year old wisdom that if he had made one mistake we were all dead, instilled admiration for the man.

But hey — his father probably knew how to stick a penny in a fuse.