Help! No power at all?
 

Hi all!

I got up this morning to go to work, and my car seems to be dead :( The car won't unlock using the key fob (main & spare), unlocking the drivers side door manually only unlocks the drivers side door, and none of the other doors can be unlocked from inside the car. The ignition doesn't show any signs of life when trying to start the car at all.

We tried jumping the car, and it gave very very slight attempts to turn over, but ultimately did nothing.

The battery is now sat on an external charger just in case (only about 10 more hours to go before we can try it...), but while looking online for any possible help i found this forum, and thought i'd see if anyone here can help. I drive a 2004 Jazz 1.4SE.

I'm pretty useless when it comes to the workings of a car, so if anyone has any suggestions please state them in a way i'd be able to understand :) Thanks in advance!

Well, if that's your original battery you're very lucky. If it's the second battery but the same size as the original that's still pretty good.

Likely it's the battery, and a reason that jump-starting didn't work could be dirty battery terminals. If you put the jumper cables on the outside of the battery connectors and the terminals are dirty you're still getting the same bad connection that your own battery had.

You can clean the battery terminals and connectors easily with sandpaper, steel wool or even scraping the gunk off with a knife- just don't take off too much metal or they won't fit back together firmly enough.