Lead Acid Battery

How many times have you encountered a sudden flat Car Battery? Worst mostly it happens during the rush hour. On older cars an experienced driver is generally aware the condition of its charging system. The main trouble is due to the inadequate charging current required to supply all those electrical equipments on your car.

Occasionally we do forget things as well; we are inadvertently leaving any of our Driving Light Applications on over the night, drawing approximately a steady at least 4 amp of current each hour. No it is not like that movie segment where a secret document is being exchanged in between cars with both driving light beam onto each other, and in a sudden twisted plot, it follows by gun fire exchanges with no survivors leaving the lights on until a passerby stumbles into the crime scene.

Armed with Jumper Cable it should be no problem finding a donor car source to supply that sweet burst of cranking ampere power to get the car wake up from its flat battery state comatose. No donor car? Push starts the car, that is if your car has manual transmission, but no jumper on an automatic car; well tough luck!

Following the principle of cost cutting measures many small cars are equipped with slight tinnier Car Battery capacity, thus the OEM Battery runs at smaller charging and hence similar discharging capacity, consequently upon heavy load there is more frequent cycle of charging and discharging which in turn shorten its life time. 

On a properly maintained Car Battery in accordance to the manufacturing specification it should last three to four years, but as electrical demand to power the current abundance equipment such as power windows, air conditioner etc., it is exponentially increasing, so does the need for bigger Battery capacity.

Though the common Lead Acid Battery has the advantage of short burst of current withdrawal for engine starting purpose, yet once it’s fully discharged it has inevitably suffered an irreversible damage to provide a full100% efficient charging and discharging cycle. It already goes in the failing down slope cycle, which new battery replacement is imminent.

As it has been said earlier there is a tendency for the car manufacturing in the spirit of cost cutting measure to equip smaller Car Battery capacity as the OEM part, and hence a significant Battery life time reduction. Such trend appears more profoundly on the lower class production cars, such as matching Battery capacity for a subcompact should have been 45 ah (JIS NS60) but instead they are equipped as OEM part a 35 ah (JIS NS40Z) Car Battery .

There is hardly a surprise for today’s Car that its OEM Lead Acid Battery could only last a mere one year period. Heavy current load at snail pace traffic could be the main culprit, as charging process at near idle engine revs only occur in the vicinity of 60% rate, the higher the rpm the closer to reach 100% charging rate capacity. The alternator is engineered to be operating at such condition to allow for its best life time expectancy.