Okay, so a habit of those of us in the great white north, we plug in our cars when it gets cold. It's funny if we have someone from not our areas see our vehicles and having that cord just out of the hood, they are perplexed.
When it gets REALLY cold, we plug it in and there's a little heater to help keep the battery from freezing. A cold cold battery has a hard time starting.
A couple times this past winter we had forgotten on the wife's older car and it wouldn't start. Tho' I also think it's the battery as there were moments when it would just die.
Needless to say, a dead battery is NOT something you want to ever have to deal with. Now that it's spring, starting to plan some of our trips and / or camping outings. Last thing you'd want to worry about is coming back from 5 days in the bush and your car is dead to get you home.
A skill we used to be taught all the time was how to jumpstart a vehicle. You do need another vehicle... and jumper cables... and then the arcane knowledge of who's battery + connection gets connected to where, and which goes to a ground, etc... Let alone, a lot of the batteries these days don't LET YOU do a jump, or not easily.
So, here's where some extra tech can come in handy. My friends would sometimes have a spare battery in the back of the truck as a backup, or just something to jump with... feels archaic.
We literally carry batteries with us all the time these days, could those be used to start the car?
This one from Scosche can. It's got more than just some mAh for it to pass along to your vehicle's battery, but it's got the oomph in it to sustain that jumpstart (I'm no electrician to know what's really happening, so I won't pretend).
Scosche sent over 2 of them: a 600A model, and the 2000A model.
The difference being that the higher the Amperage, the bigger the engine it can support. The 600 can handle up to gas engines up to 4L (diesel 2L) and the 2000 can go up to 8L (diesel 7L). Not sure which is your vehicle? Well to go from $110CDN to $150CDN, best to just buy bigger. If it's an emergency situation, you don't want to second guess, or find you bought too small (and maybe you'll be using it not just for your own - I've been able to pull out ours for friends in the past).
So how does it work?
Essentially, think of them like a big phone portable battery -- well you actually can, because they can act just like a phone battery as you need.
There's ports to charge them up or charge out... just they have have an extra accessory for you to plug in and then you have battery clamps (the 2000A also has an adapter to give you a 12V cigarette lighter port).
If you need to use it like a regular phone battery charger, use it like you normally would.
When you need to jumpstart, you plug in the adapter and the red clamp goes on your + terminal, and the black on the - terminal.
Hold the boost button for 3 seconds and wait.
If the light goes green, start you vehicle. If it's red, it's not connected correctly (or too loosely). Once all done, just disconnect everything (do the - first).
There's even a little LED on it for you to help illuminate the scene (because if something goes wrong, it's usually in unideal conditions, like the dark).
Cool.
Ultimately, this is one of those things that you buy and you hope you never use. Means, you never came into that emergency situation. But when you need it, you'll be thanking yourself.
We'd always had one in our vehicles and been thankful, except the last one we had, I guess it had been a while since I 'checked in' on it and the battery ultimately had swollen ... oops.
So, I would recommend you check in on the battery periodically. Every season. I'm putting this in the back seating holder so that we can see it, and on road trips I can offer that as a means to charge people's phones, so it's getting some usage.
It's got a nice little pouch to be placed in and keep everything together.
If you ever live in colder environments, or are planning for a long trip where you may need your car to work to get you home after its been left alone for a few days, you'll want to have this.
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