12 Volt TV Batteries

The Life in Your 12 Volt TV Battery

Open the hood of most cars, boats, semi-trucks, RVs, even tanks, and you will likely find a 12 volt battery stationed in a relatively easy to access location. How much do you really know about the versatile energy cell that’s powering your 12 volt TV, aside from which connectors to attach the jumper cables to (and that car batteries are a lot heavier than they look)?

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The 12 Volt Battery

All forms of industrial energy production, whether they originate from steam, coal, turbine, solar or nuclear have one end goal in mind: producing electricity. If you’re reading this right now, it’s a safe bet that you could look in any direction and witness the ever-present nature of electricity. It is common knowledge that batteries have two polarities, represented by the plus (+) sign for positive and the minus (-) sign for negative. Most people know that the battery is what allows you to turn your vehicle on, listen to its radio, activate your headlights, and perform the various other miscellaneous, electricity-dependent functions inherent to piloting a vehicle. Many of us have even had the dubious “pleasure” of jumping or replacing a dead car battery. Electrical power is the lifeblood of the 12 volt TV and modern world, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. With so many products and machines that depend on electrical power, it’s no surprise that people would need to find a way to keep their devices alive when separated from an electrical grid. This is where the star of our article comes in: the battery.

Batteries Are in Everything but What’s inside a Battery?

While batteries come in an astounding array of categories, the battery itself is still one of the very few ways to store electrical energy for any length of time. Any battery you purchase in a store will almost certainly be a chemical storage battery, meaning that the electrical potential of the battery is captured in one of many possible arrangements of metal and chemical. A common kind is Lead-Acid, which is probably the one that’s currently powering your 12 volt TV, though one can just as easily encounter Zinc-Chloride and other, more exotic compositions. The acid in the first instance is usually of the hydrochloric variety; chemicals in other batteries vary and can be liquid or gel, with gel often referred to as “dry.” Another kind of battery you may encounter often, especially in AA or AAA batteries, is Lithium-Ion.

When batteries are not hooked up to your 12 volt television, there is no easy way for the electrical potential they contain to escape, so they keep it more-or-less contained (though they will lose juice over time, more power is lost in warm temperatures, so keep your batteries in the fridge!). When hooked up to a 12 volt TV, however, the metal and chemicals will react to give up the electrons (the fundamental unit of electricity) from their atomic structures. Those electrons are sucked out of the battery and fed into the electronic devices in need of powering. Once all the electrons are pulled out, you’re left with an inert container of the aforementioned metals and chemicals. Rechargeable batteries have become more common, more efficient, and more useful in recent years, though even they eventually give up the ghost and must be safely disposed of in favor of a fresh set.

12 Volt: The Unsung Hero of Batteries

Everyone can identify a AA, AAA, D and probably a few other common varieties of battery, as well as the items they power. Less frequently thought of, though, is the incredibly useful 12 volt battery. The 12 volt battery is incredibly common; you really can find them everywhere.  It has long been a staple of powering devices, and has been the uncontested king of automotive batteries for about as long. Even with the old school Lead-Acid battery, which is a fairly inefficient arrangement when compared to more modern developments, you can draw a startling amount of juice for your 12 volt TV before needing to find a replacement.  For a standard car battery, say a Rayovac 926 (one of the “dry” batteries mentioned briefly above), you can expect about 7,400 milliamp hours.

What this means is that you can draw one milliamp every hour for 7,400 hours, or 7,400 milliamps for one hour or any variable in between (for reference, 1,000 milliamps comprise one amp). Speaking a little more plainly, this means that if you had a device that used, say, 500 milliamps an hour, you could have fourteen of them hooked up to the same car battery and they would run for over an hour.

Getting the Most From Your 12 Volt

If you have a boat, RV, semi or any other platform on which you use a 12 volt battery and would like to have several home amenities functioning, your “amp budget” is an important thing to keep in mind. You’ll want to take diligent note of how much electrical power the devices you purchase and activate are eating, lest you run your battery to death without noticing.

Another significant factor is the temperature at which you’ll be operating your 12 volt TV. Cold weather impacts the amount of electricity that will be available at any given time. Hot weather will increase the amount of electricity that gets used. If you think back to your high school science class, you may remember that any kind of energy, be it heat, electrical or kinetic is the product of molecules getting excited, moving around, taking up more space and aligning themselves less rigidly. Just as your muscles have a hard time being energetic in the cold, so does intense cold impede the ability of molecules to jump around energetically. Just as hot weather can makes it easier for your muscles to be limber, flexible, and energetic at the cost of potential to overheat and exhaust yourself, so does intense heat impede a battery’s ability to accurately control its outflow to your 12 volt television.

Fortunately, every second that your vehicle is pumping its pistons and spinning its gears is a second that the vehicle’s motor is recharging the battery, using harvested movement energy to feed electrons back into storage. This is why you can have your headlights on for hours while driving and be fine, while leaving them on in your unattended vehicle overnight necessitates jumper cables. It’s also why, after having your car jumped, people will tell you to let the car run for a while before turning it off. You want to have some juice in the battery for next time.

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