So why 12V and not 18V? What’s with the different levels for cordless tools 12/18/24.
In: 4
Someone decided to go with 12v back in the early days and it just became the standard. To a certain extent it was the highest voltage you could get out of an early battery without needing more than one person to lift it. (Lead-acid batteries are heavy, and the more voltage they put out the heavier they need to be). Once a few manufacturers had settled on 12v that was the size the battery makers produced, so every other car manufacturer just went along with it. So light bulb manufacturers built lamps that worked at that voltage, etc.
For power tools using 12/18/24 . Most are powered by a battery pack that itself contains standard cells taped together. These batteries originally each output around 1.5v, so it was easy to combine them in multiples of 2×1.5 or 3v. Modern Lithium cells put out 3.7v so you sometimes see the packs listed as 18v when they actually put out 5×3.7 or 18.5v – as long as the pack is mated with equipment designed to actually use the voltage it’s putting out, there isn’t a problem – but it is one reason why power tool batteries so often use proprietary interfaces.
Modern EV’s are actually slowly ditching the 12v battery and moving to a more powerful 30v low voltage system – or at least several manufacturers have announced they will do this, I’m unsure if any are actually in production.
Latest Answers