MicksGarage Service Academy: How To Jump Start Your Car

Its happened to most of us, you come out of the house, shopping centre or back from the airport or wherever, get in your car, turn the key.........and.......nothing...flat battery.....Balls!

You're either going to need a jump start, a bump start or you're going to have to call a man in a van to come and rescue you, he'll probably want to be paid for his troubles too. For the majority of people, calling the man in the van is not a problem especially if you have AA cover or breakdown assist on your insurance policy but if you're a car guy, calling the man in the van is tantamount to treason, it's the absolute last resort & shame will be bought upon your family!

Carrying a simple set of jump leads or a power pack in the boot will solve all your problems and once you get the car running again will reinforce your status to your mates/wife/children etc as an all round, good, handy guy to keep around the place.

Joking aside, keeping a set of  jump leads or a power pack in the boot is going to save you a load of time, possibly money and stress and they're not expensive, they start at under €20.00 - and the ones we sell at MicksGarage are good ones, not cheap, plasticky ones with hardly any copper in the cables like some companies sell.

So let's assume you have jump leads and your going to jump start your car. It's a very simple process but there are some extremely important safety precautions which must be followed and a strict order in which the cables should be connected and disconnected. To make the procedure as simple as possible to understand we've created this infographic:

Jump starting requires a 2nd car, but what if you're stuck in the middle of nowhere or it's the middle of the night and nobody's around?

That's where this bad boy comes in....

This is the iSparQ600 from Stark Power. (we're not 100% certain but we think the design was leaked from Tony Stark's lab) It's a massively cool piece of kit in a tiny little box that packs enough punch to start an engine of up to 6 litres in capacity!....and it'll fit in your glovebox. 

it will also recharge mobile phones, laptops, tablets etc multiple times. What's really cool is that unlike traditional, heavy and bulky booster packs, once it's charged, it will stay charged for up to 3 years, so it's always ready when you need it.

I've been using one for the last couple of days just to get familiar with it before we shoot a product review video, so far I'm very impressed. Out of the box it was fully charged, which was nice. It has charged up my Galaxy S4 from empty twice (in an hour and a half each time) and also a Galaxy S3 and an iPhone 5. The display says it still has 50% power left. I'm heading to the NEC in Birmingham tomorrow to the Autosport International show & i'm going to bring it with me on the plane so I have a source of power for the laptop and the phone. When it gets down to about 20% we're going to try and jump start a car and see how it gets on. We did try jump starting the van at work which has a 2.8 litre diesel engine and it fired up straight away, that was on a full charge and we completely removed the battery...so we can certainly vouch that it packs a decent punch!

Watch this space for more news on the Stark Power iSparQ 600 

Click here for another super informative blog about how to Bump Start your car!

oh wait,  I actually haven't written that one yet, but in the mean time you could click on some of these sharing buttons below!