Electricity Consumption And Battery Size

[TurboSeavy]

I'm planning to get some ground lights, fogs and stuff for the car. Do I have to change the car battery which has higher amperage?

e*ide battery sizes

According to this there are several battery sizes with almost the same specs ne... A while back I had to replace the car battery and when I queried the battery shop they said there are 3 battery sizes which will fix to the battery bay of my car. I don't recall correctly but they said that they have 35, 45 and 60 battery sizes which provide the same Amperes.

Can some guru shed some light on this dilemma?

[Hola]

Ground lights for a N16? epa machang. Shall we use those funds for something else? Fogs is a good idea to make the car look good plus its usefull. I had my fogs recently and i have my TV,VCD player too, and nope-no battery upgrade was done.

[Elvis_Pil]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_battery

http://www.autobatteries.com/basics/selecting.asp

[TurboSeavy]

Ground lights for a N16? epa machang. Shall we use those funds for something else? Fogs is a good idea to make the car look good plus its usefull. I had my fogs recently and i have my TV,VCD player too, and nope-no battery upgrade was done.

No worries bro, I ain't gonna buy a set of expensive ground lights. Got a little project on my mind. Will let you know if I succeed.

Edited March 28, 2007 by TurboSeavy

[Hola]

No worries bro, I ain't gonna buy a set of expensive ground lights. Got a little project on my mind. Will let you know if I succeed.

stil machang expensive or cheap leave the N16 as it is, shall we do the skirt sooner?

[Dtr]

so long as the total power consumption of all your additions + the manufacturers electrical loads doesn't exceed the capacity of the alternator its OK to continue with the same battery.

any way when you connect additional electrical loads to the car it increases the load on the alternator. the battery is just a reserve used only to start the car and once the engine is started, its the alternator that supplies the entire electrical load + charges the battery to top it up.

so if you are not planning to use the additions when the engine is not running the size of the battery is not an issue, the original one would do fine.

always make sure you satisfy the first point I mentioned.

TOTAL ELECTRICAL LOAD must be lower than the alternator capacity.

One more thing I'd like to mention here.

Generally machines are made not to operate at their maximum load through out.

Eg: You may have an alternator with a capacity of 90A. it does not mean that you can operate it with a 90A load all the time. May be it would work fine with a transient load of 90A and a continuous load of about 50A. otherwise the equipment would burn off.

manufacturers make equipment of a higher pawer rating than required to maintain reliability.

[Croozer]

TOTAL ELECTRICAL LOAD must be lower than the alternator capacity.

One more thing I'd like to mention here.

Generally machines are made not to operate at their maximum load through out.

Eg: You may have an alternator with a capacity of 90A. it does not mean that you can operate it with a 90A load all the time. May be it would work fine with a transient load of 90A and a continuous load of about 50A. otherwise the equipment would burn off.

manufacturers make equipment of a higher pawer rating than required to maintain reliability.

Hey Dtr, Just curious to know as to how the alternator capacity is determined ? Eg 90A.

Tks in advance,

Cheers

[Dtr]

Hay EVO

an alternator is an electrical power generating device. so the Max power that the alternator can handle depends on the thickness of the conductors used on the windings inside the alternator.

general rule is when a current passes through a conductor, heat is generated. Higher the current, higher would be the generated heat, so we always got to see that the current we pass through all electrical equipment would not exceed safe values to prevent over heating.

this justifies the reason for all electrical equipment to have power ratings.

consider the equation below

Power (W) = Voltage (V) x Current (I)

so generally when talking of a lamp we talk about a wattage (W), {Eg 50W, 65W, 75W etc}

To calculate the current drawn by a lamp which has a rating of 75W {Eg: head lamp bulb} we could make use of the above equation.

W=V x I

75 = 12 x I {V = 12 as the voltage of the electrical system of a car is 12}

I = 75/12 = 6.25A Since current is measured in amperes we say that the lamp would consume 6.25 amperes of current when connected to a 12V power source.

so what manufacturers do is, calculate the total power requirement of the vehicle and decide on an alternator capacity, so that the total power requirement of the vehicle would be about 60% or so of the alternator capacity to prevent a very high current passing through the windings and resulting in burning of the alternator.

hope this explanation satisfies you

[VVTi]

No worries bro, I ain't gonna buy a set of expensive ground lights. Got a little project on my mind. Will let you know if I succeed.

Just curious, where can one buy a set of decent Fogs for P11?