eli5 what is meant by battery ratings?

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**Q1:** I have a battery, say 15 AH and I have a load which consumes 1.5Amps; How does this used to see the capacity of a battery? If the battery is able to deliver 15 AH of capacity that means will it die/discharged in 10 seconds if I put a 1.5 Amps load on it since load is taking 1.5 Amps from battery every second or does it mean it will die/discharged in 10 hours? Is the rating on battery tells us the discharging rate in hours or seconds?
**Another question:** What will happen if I connect the AC terminals to battery? I know it won’t charge but will it explode or something like that? Is it dangerous for us/battery to do this thing? If I have a line wire from which both AC and DC are passing through and now I connect the battery with it, will it be able to filter its DC component from wire itself (and charge itself) or do I have to make a filter(rectifier) for it to separate DC 1st and then charge the battery?
**Q3:** What will happen if I use the neutral wire to carry both the DC + AC line? Should I use a thicker wire? Will it cause some different oscillations in the wire? Is it bad for the AC line?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is several layers of misunderstanding electricity in general and you should not attempt any of what you just asked.

Q1 was adequately answered by another commenter, I’m gonna focus on Q2 and Q3.

Q2: If you connect AC voltage to your battery leads, depending on battery type and internal wiring, you’re most likely to see the breakdown of whatever small internal circuitry they have, if applicable – reverse current protections most likely. After that, the circuit may either be broken down and the battery will become an open circuit element, it will either explode due to massively overloading the cells, or… if you somehow had a battery designed to resist such voltages and currents, nothing would happen. Batteries can’t charge on AC. This is because, as the name implies, AC waveforms are alternating. You have a positive and a negative cycle at whatever supply frequency your country uses. That means the battery will charge on the positive side of the wave, and discharge on the negative side of it. Since the cycles are precisely equal, your battery will never gain charge.

For the second part of the question, this is again massively misunderstanding electricity. A rectifier will not filter a DC component from AC, it will simply rectify the AC waveform into DC. So you wouldn’t need something like that. Leaving aside the incredibly bad idea of mixing AC supply with your own DC supply on the same wire, this is actually possible and done to a certain extent on closed systems only. To get the useful working DC voltage out of your live wire, all you have to do is use a different carry wire for the negative side of the DC(read: NOT THE AC NEUTRAL WIRE). Since the voltage received is just a difference in potential, ideally your DC device will never even notice there’s also AC on the wire. However, I must stress that this is a really really bad idea and any screw ups with grounding can be very dangerous, and will most certainly fry your DC device unless you have built in protections.

Q3: Every time you mention only one wire I cringe a bit. You can’t use a single wire for transmission. You have to use another for the return path. So if you wanted to put DC on your neutral wire, you still have another carrier wire you need to worry about. If you’re thinking of using the same live + neutral wire for the DC positive and negative connections, you will absolutely short your power source and it will absolutely die a gruesome death. Also your breaker will probably trip. And even if you use a separate carry wire for DC, if the neutral wire is grounded, which most are at least at the closest transformer, your DC power source will continually leak current to that ground, and if the ground is close enough that the parasitic resistance in the wire is too low, it will just short your DC source to ground. There’s just no winning, like why would you ever try this? Just do separate wiring for projects like this, lol.

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