Tag: farm

I was spending the weekend at my parent’s place in Southern NSW, but they had headed off to Melbourne early on Sunday morning for my Dad’s high school reunion. Meanwhile, my brother and I were still at home. I tried to start my car to leave, and realise I’d left the headlights on, grr, thereby flattening the battery.

We managed to find some jumper leads (note to self – buy jumper leads), and went to jump start the car. I’d never actually connected the leads myself before to jump start anything, neither had Bryden – but he had gotten a lesson in how to do it just a few weeks ago, so we figured we should be able to manage (positive to positive, etc etc, what could go wrong). There are sparks – we decided that was ok. But then there was some smoke. Oops. We ran into the house and ask the internet what to do. Found lots of wonderful stories about sparks igniting things and exploding batteries. But worked out what we were doing was right – we wandered back out to the cars to try and work out what went wrong… and spot our silly mistake oops, the terminals are the other way round in my car, and we’d connected positive to negative. Lots of oops.

We got things fixed up, started my car, left both car and ute running, everything seemed good – I checked the things that could have been affected by the smoking region… everything seems to work still. So that’s alright. But after a while, I decided to turn the car off and see if it will start again. No. We try jump starting again. Nope, battery won’t do anything.

I resigned myself to leaving my car behind and catching the coach/train back to Melbourne (meaning I’ll get home at 8 in the night instead of 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and get to spend some quality time with bogans on the way). However, we came up with a cunning plan – the battery in the Mazda is about the same size … yes, the same size, but as we discovered when we tried to hook it up, it has different terminals. Curses. So, new plan – call the NRMA and see if they’ll come and bring me a new battery and fix my car. The man comes from Narrandera with a new battery, and my car works again, hooray!