Optima Red Top Battery (87-11 Jeep Wrangler YJ, TJ & JK)

Video Review & Installation

The Optima red top battery is for those of you that have a 1987 to a 2011 YJ, TJ, or early year JK that are looking for a replacement battery that's going to have a few features that not your average battery is going to have. This is still going to be a very simple one out of three wrench installation as is changing any battery. Very easy to pop this in. I'm going to show you exactly how to do that in just a second. So, when you're looking at an Optima batteries, you're really going to find three different ones, the red top, the yellow top, and then the blue. The blue is the marine so we're not going to talk too much about that one. The yellow is going to be a deep cycle battery, so that's designed to be drained very far and then brought back up again, charged back up again on a fairly regular basis. You aren't going to be using that as the only battery on your Jeep. If you have a dual battery setup, you may have a yellow top as one of your two batteries. But, if you're just looking to replace your regular starting battery, your one battery on your JK, it's going to be with the Optima red top. This is designed to provide the most amount of power, the most amount of cranking amps right up front to get the engine kicked over for you. So, this is going to be an 800 cold cranking amp battery, which is going to be a good amount of power. It's going to be right around where a lot of the other batteries are going to be that you'll find. What really makes an Optima battery different from a lot of the other ones is their SPIRALCELL technology. That's patented technology that Optima has. It's what makes their battery look a little bit different. It looks like six individual cylinders all sort of molded together, and the idea there is that the different design helps make everything a little bit more vibration resistant and just in general, have a little bit of a longer life, a little bit more longevity. That combined with the fact that they use very high grade, very pure lead inside their batteries means that you're going to get something that charges a little bit quicker and is able to put out a lot of amperage right up front to kick the engine over and to get it running for you. So, there are going to be a couple of different benefits to an Optima battery over your traditional flooded battery or watered battery. Again, very, very simple to install a battery like this, so we're going to show you how to do that right now.All you need for this installation is a 10-millimeter socket, an extension, and a 3/8 socket driver. So, of course, installing a battery is going to be a very simple one out of three wrench installation. A battery's a wear item, so Jeep makes it very, very easy to remove a battery and pop a new one in place, and this Optima battery is going to be no different. So, the first step we're going to take is removing the battery terminals, of course, the positive and the negative, and all they take is one 10-millimeter wrench to loosen up the nuts on the terminal. So, we're going to go ahead and do that now. Once you have the battery terminals out of the way, there's one more bolt down here that holds the battery into the battery tray. So, you'll have to remove that before you can remove the battery entirely. Once you have that bolt nice and loose, you can remove the battery. Now, you can drop the new Optima battery on the battery tray. Once you make sure the battery is sitting fully down in the tray, you can go ahead and tighten the bolt on the front that locks it down. After the battery is firmly tied down into the tray, you can remove the terminal covers, then replace the battery cables onto the terminals, of course, making sure that you're connecting positive to the positive side, and negative to the negative side. Of course, when you're tightening that positive terminal, you want to make sure that the other end of your wrench doesn't touch anything metal. You'll have some sparks. This is a good opportunity to clean up the ends of your battery cable, so if you have any corrosion around them. And you do want to make sure that these are pretty tight. You should be able to grab this and wiggle it and not have it twist on the terminal at all. This is an area where a lot of people end up having an issue. They have weird starting issues or electrical issues, and it's simply a loose terminal, so make sure you tighten those down good and tight. So, if you are looking for a replacement battery and you want one that's designed to be rugged and hold up over a long period of time, I would recommend taking a look at this one from Optima, and you can find it right here at extremeterrain.com.