Hi. I should probably already know this, but I don’t, so I thought I’d ask here.
If I have a charger marked as 1,5A and then try to charge a battery with 2Ah, what will happen?
- Is the battery going to be charged, but slower?
- Charged but not fully?
- Not charged at all?
You’re mixing up two units.
Let’s say your battery has a capacity of 2 Ah (ampere * hours) and your charger outputs 2A (Ampere). This means the charger would need 1 hour to fully charge your battery. Now take a 1A charger, this would take 2 hours to charge the same battery.
Clear and concise. Thanks.
Ah is capacity, A is flow rate. As long as the voltages are correct, it’ll charge eventually.
Ah == size of the bucket, A is the size of the hose you fill it with.
Very easy to understand analogy. Thanks for that. Makes it very clear on how it works. Doesn’t sound like a too small hose should cause problems then?
A straw for a swimming pool would be bad, but I think you’re ok
Bad only in a time sense. There’s nothing bad safety wise, slow charging decreases heat and prolongs battery longevity.
so 2Ah really means “2 amp-hour”. it measures how much of a charge it has- basically, you can draw 2 amps for one hour from the battery during ideal conditions (IE, it’s not an old battery, and everything about it is perfect- perfect temp, perfectly isolated from vibrations. all sorts o things. We never see that in the real world, however.)
alternatively, you could draw 1 amp for 2 hours, or 4 amps for half an hour.
1.5 amps is the amount of charge it’s providing to the battery, again, under ideal conditions (like temperature, etc.) a 1 amp charger would charge slower where a 2 amp charger would charge faster.
The important thing is that the voltages match- 12v or 18v tend to be the most common. if the charger has too much amperage, it’s fine- the battery will only draw what it can use; too little and it’ll just take forever to charge.
Too much amperage for a circuit is fine, for a battery is not. A circuit will present a known resistance and draw what is needed for a specific voltage. The batteries’ resistance will be very low at empty and change over the course of charge, and certain chemistries can be damaged over 1C.
