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?
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.
Good answer and explanation. Thank you.