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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Electricity can be kind of confusing like that. We have so many analogies for it but none of them are fully accurate. What you need to know for batteries is that we are taking electrical energy and storing it as potential energy in a reversible chemical reaction. Charge the battery we aren’t adding electrons, we are giving energy to one side of the battery which causes reaction to go to its energized state. Think of it like winding up a spring.
So you’re taking the energized end and (the positive terminal) and using it to give energy to the depleted positive terminal of the dead battery. The negative terminal is just there to give the energy something to safely and stably flow towards. That’s why you can connect the black negative cable to a ground wire and not the negative terminal of the batter and still have the same effect.
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