Understanding how long a battery lasts can be perplexing. A 100 amp hour battery might sound wholesome to you, but in real life, the workload and the battery’s service time is a different ball game. To a consumer, the most common question is how long a 100 amp hour battery lasts with a 30 amp load in minutes, hours, and even days. This article will give you a perspicuous view of how long a battery usually serves.
The fine line between Amps and Amp Hours
Don’t perplex yourself by mixing up the terms Amps and Amp-hours. These are two similar words with different meanings. The unit of electrical current is defined as Amps; on the other hand, Amp-hours is the storage capacity of the current.
Numerical Formula and Accurate Time
No mathematical formula will precisely give you the service time of your battery. It all depends on the battery’s efficiency, how long you put it to work, and what load it is bearing. That being said, we have a few tricks that will let you evaluate how long a 100 Amp-hour battery will last.
The basic calculation
First, calculating the power is important as we must know how much power a particular battery induces. To do so, you must be familiar with amp hours and volt, and you can see it tagged in the body of your battery. To figure out the power (Watt), we will use the formula
Watt hours= Amp-Hours X Voltage
For a 12-volt battery that has 100 amp hour
1200 WH = 100AH X 12v
Therefore, a 100 Amp battery will be able to suffice 1200 watts per hour or the breakdown of 600 watts in 120 minutes.
If you want to know how long a 100 amp hour battery last with a 30 amp load, then you have to use the following formula of battery life to determine the time frame.
Battery life = Battery capacity (Ah)/Load current (Ah)
So, for a 30 amp load, the serving time should be
Battery life = 100 Ah / 30 Ah
Therefore, a 100 amp battery will last 3 hours 19 minutes, with a 30 Ah amp load.
No matter what calculation you put into the paper, you will see a mammoth difference in maths and real-life usage. Calculating how long a 100 amp hour battery will last with a 30 amp load is not as easy as the mathematical formula. So many other factors change the whole scenario, and you get a different result in the real world.
Let’s look at some of the possible factors.
Uneven discharge from the battery
The power that a battery provides usually degenerates as time goes by because consumers tend to use the battery to power up different appliances at different times thus, the battery has to go through fluctuating discharge rates in response to the load it endures.
Does Not Fully Charge
Sometimes, the charging of the battery is practically halted at 80-90 but due to glitches to 100% due to faulty chargers. Multi-stage chargers can be used to fight off the inefficiency and boost the battery to nearly 100%.
Overheating
To power up a small appliance, the battery doesn’t need to generate a hefty amount of power, but when used in something larger, it will bombard with power to the fullest if necessary. Either way, a battery tends to heat up and cause it to decay gradually and come to a stalemate eventually.
Overkill
Few appliances draw power even if not in function. Yes, due to technical aspects, these appliances and small gadgets somehow drain the battery and affect the output, hindering the overall amp-hour without you realizing it. Don’t cry over it, because it is a common dilemma everywhere.
Rated for 5 amps over 20 hours of time
All batteries are labeled to have a minimal load of 5 Amps, supporting this notion, a 100Ah battery with a load of 5 amps will last up to 20 hours. This looks good on paper-to-be honey. Are you always going to be consistent with a 5 amp load? No! You might power something small to something large scale, but the 5 amp load will not suffice all the time. As the load is about to fluctuate up and down, the battery will serve accordingly, meaning it might last less than 20 hours or even more, depending on the intake.
Let’s go with a video review of the battery capacity test
Battery cycle life has to be taken into account
How long will a 100 amp hour battery last? It depends on the cycle of life. Different battery types have different life cycles, also known as recharge cycles. Lithium-ion batteries usually have longer cycles, easily peaking to thousands compared to lead-acid batteries with limited rechargeable cycles within hundreds. Everything lines up and takes a toll eventually, from draining of power to the number of recharges, all of these issues toil the overall holding capacity of the battery.
How Long Will a 100 Amp Hour Battery Last With a 30 Amp Load – Final Verdict
So the question once again is, how long will a 100 amp hour battery last with a 30 amp load? The outlook of this article is there to answer your call. I don’t want to force-feed you by stating numbers that might sound lucrative but doesn’t live up to the expectation. As mentioned above, a battery is an intricate piece of design that gives output depending on your input, so there is no locked answer to this question, but there are feasible ways to evaluate the life span. If you know your battery, the appliances, and the amount of load they serve, you can understand battery life well.