Car Care Tools For Your Battery
With just a bit more effort and not much more expense, you can keep your car’s battery in tiptop shape with a few tools. The lure of adding the battery to the easy tasks of keeping things tight is that you may be able to avoid being stranded because the heart of your electrical system went dead. To do the battery job thoroughly, you’ll need one tool, two sprays, and a tester.
- The One Battery Tool – Terminal cleaners come in a couple of different styles, depending on the design of the battery in your car. What these cleaners do is scrape away a thin layer of metal from the terminal posts and from the battery cables to ensure excellent contact between them. Don’t worry about sparking. Battery terminals are soft lead, so there is no danger of sparking during the cleaning process. As long as you do not see corrosion, there is little need to remove the battery cables from the battery and clean them. But corrosion can spring up quickly. If it does, you’ll be prepared.
- The Two Sprays – One of the sprays will clean corrosion from the battery cables. It is possible to scrape the corrosion from the cables, but often the corrosion gets in between the bundle of copper wires that make up the battery cable, making it difficult to clear away all corrosion. The cable cleaner spray will penetrate better, more effectively preventing corrosion’s return. The second is a spray can of corrosion preventive. Once the battery and cables are corrosion free, reattach the cables to the terminals and spray. This will seal out moisture and air, and help maintain the good contact with the cables a battery needs to remain healthy. For this part of the procedure, Vaseline will work, too, but it is a bit messy and will have to be reapplied from time to time, since it tends to dissipate. The spray is more convenient. It behaves almost like paint, forming a thin, long-lasting protective shell.
- A Battery Tester – The battery tester comes with a pair of cables and clamps, one cable and clamp for the positive terminal and one for the negative terminal. Once hooked to the battery, a look at the scale on the tester will indicate whether the voltage in the battery is normal or low. A tester will also have a load capability, meaning that the tester can actually put a load on the battery (i.e., make the battery work as if starting the car) to see if the battery will hold voltage. There will be a switch on the tester for loading the battery. The load test will indicate the reserve strength of the battery. For example, if you load-test your car’s battery and the voltage drops from 12 volts to 7 volts, the battery is weak. But if you load-test the battery for ten to fifteen seconds and the voltage doesn’t drop below 9.5 or 10 volts, the battery is strong. If the battery is weak, you’ll be able to take it to a service station or a repair shop, or often even a parts store, and have it charged. Then if the battery won’t hold good voltage after a second load-test, you know the battery is weak, and you can replace it before you wind up stuck in the middle of nowhere.
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