When your battery ages to a certain extent, its ability to hold charge slowly decreases with time. Therefore the voltage of your car battery when you start your car may get decreased if you are in colder climates. During cold weathers, the car batteries that are fully functional and charged, their ability to provide the high current required by the starter motor goes down by approximately 40 percent. You might be aware of the fact that it is generally advised not to park cars outdoors in freezing temperatures. 3 Factors that Can Affect the Car Battery VoltageĪlthough the voltage readings mentioned above are quite accurate and shouldn’t fluctuate much unnecessarily, the following factors can have a huge impact on it: 1. In case of higher or lower voltage readings than the ones mentioned above, your battery and alternator might be faulty and not functioning properly. During that time, the alternator of your vehicle is busy charging the battery therefore a voltage appears that is higher than usual. When the engine of your vehicle is running, the voltage of your car battery should be between 13.5 and 14.7 volts. Although, extreme weather conditions such as freezing temperatures can also cause the voltage to drop and increase the power requirement of the engine to turn over. If the battery of your car is in a healthy condition and doesn’t have any faults, its voltage when you start your car should be 10 volts or higher. At that time, the voltage of the battery drops for a small amount of time, before going up again. When You Start Your CarĮvery time you start your automobile, its battery becomes the source of power for the starter motor which in result uses that power to turn over the engine. A voltage at this point that is below 12.6V indicates that either your battery isn’t charged to its full potential or it has malfunctioned. It is essential that you let your car sit idle for a night and measure the “resting voltage” to get an accurate voltage measurement. If you measure the voltage of your car battery shortly after you had the engine running, it is likely that you’ll get a higher and wrong reading. But this rule is applicable when the engine is turned off. When a battery is completely charged, its voltage should be at 12.6 volts or above. What Should Be the Voltage of Your Car Battery? (Having a Right Battery Voltage Range)įollowing is the breakdown of the voltages a car should be at during its different stages: Stage1. This movement of electrons is called electric current, and it is measured in amperes (also called amps). Once these two posts are connected through a circuit, those negatively charged particles are free to proceed towards the positive terminal. there are excessive negatively charged particles or electrons on the post, the other is positively charged, having insufficient or lesser electrons on them.īoth the terminals are separated physically so that the electrons do not get transmitted from the positively charged post to the negatively charged one. While one terminal is negatively charged i.e. For car batteries, those points would be the terminals of the battery. From this, another important question arises: What is electrical potential?Įlectric potential is the charge difference between two distinct points. The greater that potential difference is, the higher the voltage reading will be. In the case of car batteries, the term “voltage” actually refers to the electric potential difference between the negative and positive posts of a battery.
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