Re: Relocate Battery? (Revolve40)
Quote, originally posted by Revolve40 » |
but I still don't really know what will be different about the relocation. Sorry folks, thanks for your patience though. |
Let me try to explain in simple terms. I'm not good at explaining, but here it goes:
In electrical circuits, there is something known as resistance - an opposition to the flow of electrical current. For example, a piece of gold or copper wire (as you know by common knowledge to be good electrical conductors), have a low resistance, allowing for electricity to flow freely through the wire. However, a piece of wood, for example, does not allow electricity to flow through it easily, therefore it has high resistance.
So by simply putting the battery in the back of the car and tying the ground to the chassis, you are forcing all the electricity to go from the battery, through a positive wire that you routed through the car, to the engine, and then back to the battery through pretty much the entire chassis of the car. This is a much higher resistance path for the electricity to travel than if the battery was simply in the engine bay.
And the issue with resistance is that the higher resistance you have, the less current can be in the circuit. And, um, you can say current is how much power the battery can deliver, and its measured in Amps. Basically, the more resistance you have in a circuit, the lower amperage you can deliver. So by relocating to the back and tying the ground to the body, you may not have as much "power" in your battery.
So you say, I'll bring two wires, a positive and ground, to the trunk of the car. Well, to deliver all the power, or current, of the battery the wires will have to be thick (Very thick - 8 gauge, probably more). If you use thin wires, the problem is that when high current is sent through thin wires, the wires can overheat, melt the plastic sheathing on the wire, and short circuit with other connections here and there, and even catch on fire. And also, the longer wires you have, the higher resistance the connections are. So you would need a very thick gauge (wire thickness is measured in a standard called gauge if ya didn't know) to prevent overheating while being able to deliver the amperage the engine needs to crank, etc. The issue with that is how will you route two finger thick wires throughout your car to the trunk? Then there is the issue of venting the battery so you don't have corrosive gases floating around the trunk.
Sorry about the weird explanation. I just got up and haven't had coffee. If you get what I'm saying, great. If not, I'll come back and try again. But basically, if you tie the ground to the trunk, the resistance will be too high to deliver all the amperage that is needed for cranking, etc. And if you bring both ground and positive to the trunk, you would need to use an extremely low gauge wire to prevent overheating/fires/shorts while being able to provide all those nice juicy cranking amps.