Batteries in Series and Parallel Revisited

  This is a popular historical Blog post created on one of our external Blogs in 2010, revisited and transferred to the store Blog for information and good practice reasons. The post became an important feature, which tried to address bad practices that became apparent, particularly within the mobile home and boating communities as requirements of additional electrical equipment increased, highlighting the common misunderstandings of battery connectivity.

  One of the frequent questions to our help desk at Arc Components Limited is the question about batteries linked in series and parallel and the effect of voltage and amperage output. To help we created a simple guide to show the cause and effect of batteries joined together to form battery banks.

  A popular misconception (especially in the houseboat community) is when joining batteries together in parallel that the existing cables are adequate and reused, they are also often used as a pattern for sourcing additional cables for the task of creating a battery bank. Whereas the truth of joining batteries together in parallel is that the Ampere Hour (Ah) of the batteries is increased, therefore new heavier-duty cable is required to avoid the cables potentially burning out.

Associated products can be found in the automotive terminals, automotive cable and wiring products and battery shop products sections.

Batteries Joined in Series

Batteries Joined in Parallel

Batteries Used in Series and Parallel Example 1

Batteries Used in Series and Parallel Example 2

  A technician could 'pull the guide up' for technicalities such as variables in cable length etc. We created the guide as a simple presentation to show the by-product of fitting additional batteries without preparation or consultation.

Originally posted: October 2010

This blog post was created: 2nd November 2014 and closed for comment 25th July 2015.