Charging a Car Battery for Dummies

Car Battery Charger hookup

Sometimes one of our research team will read through an online post, think "OK," and move on to the next one; only to realize a moment or two later that there was some major dumbassery buried within the text. That happened recently when one of the kids was browsing the work of longtime eHowian Larry Parr: she came across one of Parr's posts titled "How to Charge a New Car Battery"¹ at Leaf Group's niche site OurPastimes.com. And about two articles later, she suddenly realized that Larry's a dumbass...

Oh, Parr was partially right when he started out by saying,

"Normally, a new car battery does not need to be charged--it is already fully charged..."

...which isn't quite correct, since most have only a partial charge by the time they're shipped from the factory and sit on the shelf for a while. But that's not why we call Larry a dumbass (for this post, not for the other nine times he's received our award), and it's not because he explained that

"...if it is necessary to charge a new car battery... follow the procedures required for safely charging any car battery--regardless of age..." ...because that's probably OK to say. Parr's not up on that award stage because he just reworded the instructions for charging a dead battery written by someone who knows how, either. No, Larry is our nominee today because he screwed up the instructions he cribbed: "Remove the cables connecting the battery to the vehicle... Remove the red (+) wire first and then the black (-) wire. Connect the red (+) charger wire to the red (+) post of the battery... Connect the black (-) charger wire to an exposed metal part of the engine block..."

OK, car people and anyone who's passed Physics 105: what did Larry do wrong? Well, in case you missed it (our researcher did, at first), Larry says to disconnect both battery cables, then connect the charger to the positive post and to a ground on the engine, just as you would hook up jumper cables.

That's not gonna work. You know why? Well, Parr didn't realize that when he removed the ground (-) cable, he created an open circuit between the battery and the engine block. Contrary to Larry's later assertion that charging should take about six hours, you could leave the charger hooked up this way until the end of time and the battery would just get deader. Dumbass.

Stupid garbage like this cluttering up the internet is exactly why the Antisocial Network staff hand out a new Dumbass of the Day award on a (near) daily basis. Allowing stupid garbage like this to be published is why Leaf Group (formerly Demand Media) is such a target-rich environment for our researchers.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_7339269_charge-new-car-battery.html

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