Testing Your Car Battery Power

Scott Elbertson: Hi, I am Scott from the Automotive Service Garage in Alexandria, Virginia. I have been showing you how to maintenance your car's battery. Now, I am going to show you how to test it.

What I have here is an electronic tester. This will actually go through the circuitry of your battery and ensure that your battery is in proper working condition. Connect the positive cable first then the negative cable and push test. As we can see this battery came up as okay which generally means, we have a good battery here.

We also have another tester which is an older style analog tester that actually will put a load on the battery. It will be more real life as far as starting the car, the load that is put on the battery when that happens, positive and negative. Now, this is an inductive probe that will actually tell us how much of a load we are putting on the car battery so that we will know not to overextend that and as we can see our battery maintained a nine volt level so that we know that this battery is in good shape. Now, let us remove our terminals. Now, this equipment is normally found in a repair shop but there is something you can do at home if you want to do just a general check on your battery. But make sure that you have a way to start your car if your battery does go dead. What we can do is go in, turn the headlights on in the car and leave the car sit for five or ten minutes.

Now, we have had our lights on for ten minutes so now, we are going to see that the car will start. It pretty much tells that our battery is in good shape. Now, it is something to make sure of because extreme changes in temperature, either a summer or a winter will affect batteries. We have let the lights on, we have loaded it, we have checked it with our Midtronics; everything looks good there. This car's battery is good to go. Thank you for watching this video from the Automotive Service Garage. Now, that we have shown you basic battery maintenance you should be able to jump-start your car, clean your battery cables, replace your battery and test your battery.