Why electric current doesn’t decrease for each wire i connect to a battery?

Question

For example, if i have a battery with 10V of power, and then i connect a wire to the battery it will have 10A of current in it.

If i connect 2 wires, why current doesn’t split between the two wires so that i have 5A in each one?

I have no knowledge in this area, the only logical conclusion i can come to with the little information i have is that both wires will have 10A of current because both will “work at full potential”, but then, the battery will run out of power at double the speed compared to having only 1 wire connected.

Is my guess correct or the solution is another one?

Thanks in advance.

In: 1

Answer 1

It depends on what you connected the wires to.

If you connect to a load (say, a light bulb), that pulls 10A, then it pulls 10A…if you have one wire, that will carry 10A. If you have two, it will split and each will carry 5A. If you have 100, they’ll each carry .1A.

If you connect to *two different loads* that each pull 10A, then each wire will carry 10A, for 20A total and the battery will indeed drain twice as fast. Because it’s doing twice as much.

We usually assume wires have “zero” resistance. In reality that’s not true, but wire resistance is so low compared to real world loads that “zero” is usually a close enough approximation.