what battery are you using?

[zoomie]

ive had nothing but bad experiences with auto-lite, exide, and ac-delco batteries...but then again i dont think you guys blast your system all god damned day like i do lol. this one time i went through 3 brand new exide batteries in a matter of 5-6 hours...i wanted to see if they would put up with my system being turned all the way up(engine off of course)...and they didnt. so recently i was having issues with my battery(was dying out again) and went ahead and bought myself a nice(expensive) yellow top optima. ever since ive had it, i leave my system turned on full blast while working on my brothers cv and when i go to start it up....fires right up....love that thing!

quite the contrary i do blast my system when i have one in my car never had a batt go dead but then again i ve never had anything over 800 w but thats going to change this year im getting a hifonics amp but still deciding on subs though

[ltdcrwnvic]

quite the contrary i do blast my system when i have one in my car never had a batt go dead but then again i ve never had anything over 800 w but thats going to change this year im getting a hifonics amp but still deciding on subs though

i see...thats why youre not going through batteries like i am...im putting out at least 2,400 watts rms...so i just went ahead and bought myself an optima...

[gadget73]

Are car batteries just a case of needing to buy one big enough that it'll power all of your stuff?

weeeelll. yes and no. The rating on the battery is for cranking amps. The only thing the battery is *supposed* to do is provide engine start power, and thats all the ratings are actually useful for. All your crap is supposed to be handled by the alternator's output, but the battery does provide power during high demand idle conditions, or whenever the alternator just can't keep up. The ability to run crap all day with the engine not running and still start would be an amp-hour rating, but almost nobody publishes that figure.

Basically an amp-hour rating is simply how long you can pull how many amps for. Example, 100AH means you can pull 100 amps for an hour, or 1 amp for 100 hours. Multiply the load by the time, and thats your amp hour figure. Batteries with a very high CCA value typically don't have spectacular AH ratings, and stuff with really high AH ratings often have a lower CCA. Its just how the battery is designed, basically you have a lot of power for a short time, or less power for a long time. I'm not a battery engineer so I don't know how they differ internally though.

[1990LTD]

Thanks for the explanation!