[Vwdiesel] Cont'd Electrical gremlins - bad ground?

[mark drillock]

I thought we were discussing VW electrical systems and problems here. If
you give an answer based on a Toyota system maybe you should mention
that up front. As to battery theory, I have worked on many vehicle
electrical system but I can't recall ever seeing 14.4 volts on a
standard car battery with the charging system off. I would guess you are
a youngster as I can remember when we needed to periodically add water
to all car batteries. There were 6 caps on the top of the 12 volt
batteries and only 3 on the 6 volt ones. You might want to check your
sources for your 12 x 1.2 calculation.

Mark


Harmon Seaver wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 06:00:15AM -0800, mark drillock wrote:
> > You better get a new volt meter or something. Alternators in VWs have
> > 14v regulators. 13.9v while charging is fine. 12.5v across the battery
> > terminals is typical with everything turned off.
>
>    There's nothing a all wrong with my voltmeter. 12.5v is minimum for a "12v"
> battery. Fully charged it should be more. And you may be right about VW car
> regulators being only 14v, but I know many others are higher, and 14v is rather
> minimal. Any lead-acid cell is 1.2v at full charge. 12 of them gives you 14.4v
> and you have to have a charging rate *higher* than the fully charged voltage of
> a battery in order to charge it -- that is, a 13v charge rate won't fully charge
> a so-called "12v" battery.
>    I don't have a voltmeter in my '82 vanagon (haven't had it long enough to get
> around to that), but I know my toyota 4x4 runs a good 16v charge rate.
>
> >
> > Mark
>