Let us set the scene. You’ve been woken up at the crack of dawn by your partner shuffling around getting ready for their early shift. You’ve spent half of the morning trying to drag your teenage child out of bed to get ready for school, and the other half trying to convince them that it is not a healthy idea to lather 5 tablespoons chocolate spread on to their toast for breakfast. Your youngest child, meanwhile, is licking the icing off of the cupcakes you’ve baked for the school PTA sale. You bundle the cupcakes into the car and convince the children to put their shoes on because you’ll be late for work if you don’t get going shortly. Everyone is strapped in and ready to go but your car doesn’t start. This is not the perfect morning. But it happens to us all.
There’s a few tips you can follow if your car’s battery goes flat, and some things you can do to ensure you don’t have another morning like this! If your car isn’t completely dead, you can attempt to jumpstart the car using another car’s battery and a set of jump leads. We recommend only trying to jump start the car if you are sure the battery is not damaged, leaking or corroded. However, contacting a professional is a much safer way to jump the battery of your car and should take a similar amount of time, minus the stress.
Your other – much easier- option is to call a breakdown recovery service, who will help you jumpstart the car and also help you understand why your battery failed. It could be user negligence, for instance if you accidentally left your lights on all night, or it could be something more serious with the health battery and it could need a necessary replacement. Either way, by leaving a professional to investigate the source of the issue is a safe, efficient, reliable, and quick way to make sure that you’re back on the school run in no time.
As precautionary measures, we recommend not driving lots of short journeys, as this subjects the batteries to peak strain as they cannot recharge enough on shorter journeys. Also, ensure that your lights are always switched off, and have regular services to ensure there aren’t other elements putting a strain on your battery. Generally speaking, the average lifespan of a modern car battery is around 3 years…so if your’s is a lot older than that, it’s possible that it’s just incapable or accepting a charge anymore. And if your battery constantly keeps going flat, for no apparant reason, it would be worth investigating other causes…i.e. your car’s alternator may not be charging the battery properly.
Whilst we can fix the car battery, there’s no saving those cupcakes after the icing has been licked off…