Spent all Sunday cleaning up all my grounds. Negative battery to engine block, block to firewall, negative terminal to chassis.

Wire brushed them down to bare metal, cleaned all corrosion of of them and actually installed a 2 gauge wire from negative battery terminal to engine block (chased it down the loom that goes to starter.

After getting everything down to bare, clean metal I coated everything with dielectric grease. Nuts, bolts, cable ends, etc.

Now I find out that dielectric grease is non-conductive

I was told that someone makes a conductive grease with particles of copper and aluminum which I intend to use once I clean off all the dielectric grease I smeared on last weekend.

Hope I save someone some aggravation and let them do it right the first time.

 

You put the dielectric grease on afterwards to prevent corrosion...

 

Anti-seize works great for electrical connections but a little messy.

James

 

No, you used the right stuff. You can get conductive greases for certain applications - and it would have been good for these particular connections I suppose - but the purpose of the grease is not to enhance conductivity. The purpose of the grease is to protect the joints from corrosion. When you mechanically fasten the connections down, they squeeze the grease out of the way and make a metal-to-metal, mechanical contact. The grease is not there to MAKE the contact, but rather to KEEP the contact. You wouldn't want to use a conductive grease in multi-pin connectors.

I've seen this subject degenerate into a pointless religious debate plenty of times on Internet forums with people debating the fine points of electrons jumping across air gaps, but there are a LOT of people professional and amateur who have found a lot of success over the years using dielectric. It is the standard grease used on electrical connections. I use it on all of mine.

Chris

 

Or you could have used some No-Ox. I use dielectric on all my connections, like the big three upgrade.

 

Will a thin coat of the dielectric grease on a battery terminal decrease its ability to conduct?

....dielectric.....fun word to say.

 

^^^No, but they make a spray to coat the lugs and terminals

 

The only connections I like to leave clean and dry are the battery terminals.

It's also good a good practice to keep the battery itself clean...you can actually get a few volts running across the top of a dirty battery. Touch the probes on your meter to the plastic on top of the battery about 4-6 inches apart, you might be surprised!