So here's one weird thing that happens when I play pool. (This post is not about pool!) I often lean over, and up against, the edge of the table. Since I have my car's key fob in my pocket, occasionally I inadvertently press one of the buttons on the key fob by accident. I know this because sometimes I set off the "panic" alarm!
For the past two days we've had the most beautiful weather. The clouds moved in dramatically just a few minutes ago (a vast dark cloud bank you could see coming), but for a day and half now it's been warm (up to 40°F) and brilliantly sunny, with a thick blanket of newly fallen snow. But for four days prior to that, it snowed...and snowed, and snowed. The whole Northeast was under a sprawling snowstorm. It didn't seem to want to stop. We were only on the fringes of it—we got about ten inches here. The car was snowed in for two and half or three days. Yesterday morning my friend Eric came and plowed me out.
But evidently at some point, probably while making a sensational shot no one got to see (more's the pity), I, um, inadvertently opened the car's trunk. So when I finally got in the car to go to town...nuthin'. Flashing, blinking lights and pathetic little growls from the engine compartment. A neighbor, Jim, was plowing out the church parking area (I think it would have to be paved to be called a "parking lot"), and he came over to give me a jump, but I don't have any jumper cables, and the cheap little freebie jumper cables he had melted before we could get my car started. Seriously! Nice of him to try, though.
The last time this happened, I swore I'd buy jumper cables before the next time. Oops.
Anyway, $62.64 later, a local auto service center sent down a guy, also named Mike, with a jump starter, and I was back in business. (Mike was a dog lover too, so we talked about our pooches.)
Of course it occurred to me that this is about the fifth time I've been caught with a dead battery in my own garage, for one reason or another, and each time it costs me a nice dinner in a restaurant to get the car started. So how much does the lithium-battery jump starter Mike used cost? It was a Clore Jump-N-Carry 660. I saw prices online everywhere from $115 to $233, average about $150 or so. I've already paid out more than that for jump-starts over the past five years. I figured maybe I should just get my own jump-starter and cut my losses.
But when I looked into it, I found...
...This. It's an Autowit Supercap 2 batteryless jump-starter.
Batteryless!?
This is the kind of thing that's going to seem like old hat if you already know about it, yet might be hard to wrap your head around at first if you don't. Because it doesn't have a battery in it. You don't have to keep it charged. You just attach it to your weak battery, wait five or eight minutes or whatever it takes, press one button, and jump in your car and Bob's yer uncle.
It's a capacitor bank. When your car battery won't start the car, it's not out of juice altogether...it just doesn't have the oomph necessary to turn the engine over. So what the Autowit does is "gather" enough power from the depleted battery over a few minutes of time, until there's enough built up to start the car. Then it dumps it all at once (well, for ten seconds) to get the car started. Once the car is running, of course, its alternator recharges the battery.
Neat, huh?
It's (relatively) small and light, It'll work anywhere from Hudson Bay to Death Valley, you don't have to remember to keep it charged (this is a key point for absentminded me), and it's safe both to use and to store in the car. There's a "Lite" version for gasoline engines up to 5 liters and diesel engines up to 3.5 liters that comes with no case, which costs less than twice what I paid the man from the service center yesterday. The regular version is good for gas engines to 7 liters and diesel engines to 4 liters, comes with a case, and costs only $30 more. It will start anything but the largest pickup trucks.
There are a couple of caveats—if your battery is really drained, you might have to charge up the Autowit on something else, and if your battery is absolutely stone dead the unit might not recognize that it's connected to a battery, which is, in effect, its "on" switch. But those situations are unusual. In normal situations, by all reports, they work fine.
The Lite version is plenty for my 2.4-liter 4-cylinder car, so I just have to decide whether I want to pay $30 for a case—or whether I want to have the bigger one just so I can help other people out. I think the latter rationale will push me into buying the regular version. In olden times, I had to ask other people for jumps from time to time. It would be nice to be able to say "yes" the next time someone asks me.
Mike
I'm not even going to mention that "Open Mike" is supposed to appear on Wednesdays.
Book o' This Week:
André Kertész, On Reading, the lovingly crafted reprint of the lyrical 1971 classic by an early master of the small camera. (Would make an excellent Valentine, for a person who reads.) The above link takes you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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