I got to thinking while boosting my lawnmower’s battery. It is my understanding that the electrons leave the battery from the negative pole and enter back in via the positive pole to close the circuit. I just never understood why the 2 negative terminals were connected to each other and not to the opposite charge when performing a “boost”. If the dead battery needs energy, why not plug the good battery Negative to the bad batteriy Positive to “feed it”?
I can’t make sense of two batteries both having their negative going to one another…
My nose is bleeding. Help. Thanks!
Edit: typos
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With a car battery, there’s two separate things going on: on the one hand, you need power from the battery to start the engine; on the other hand, once the engine is running, the alternator produces electric power with which you can charge the battery.
When you boost a battery, you’re not trying to charge the dead battery with the charged battery. You’re borrowing the charged battery to get the engine going, so the engine/alternator can get to work charging the dead battery as normal. For that to work, the two poles on the charged battery need to connect to the car’s electrics at the same points as the dead battery’s poles (so it can be used to get the car running), while the dead battery is still connected at those same points (so it can charge as normal)
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