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Monday, March 7, 2011

Understanding your Battery and Charging System

To help you understand this better we will relate this to something that is understood by many, money and banking.

You could think of your car battery as a bank, only instead of storing your money it stores electrons and the flow of electrons is what does the things you direct it to do, start the engine. Similar to spending money to get the goods and services you want. Pay your rent or mortgage payment so you have a place to live.

Your income does the same thing that the charging system does, keeps money in the bank, puts electrons in the battery. The biggest expenditure made by the battery is starting the engine, you make your mortgage payment and that is for many the biggest drain on your bank account. You must use you income to gradually refill your account, the engine starts and the charging system refill the battery with the electron used to start the car. Keep in mind, most of us must take more than a couple of days to put back in the amount that was taken out by the house payment. The car must be driven more than a few minutes to refill the battery.

So now it should pretty easy to understand what can go wrong...the car won’t start. Your account is overdrawn. Unfortunately there are no credit cards, unless you consider a jumpstart, borrow some electrons and let some one else worry about replacing them.

How can this happen?

1. Not enough income, your charging system has a problem, you are spending more than you are making and your reserve is used up.

2. Some how money is being taken out of your account your not aware of (this doesn’t happen very often in banking but does happen often in cars) the key off draw, something is not shutting off.

3. You go on vacation longer than you should and have too good of time you leave your lights on.

4. The bank fails; you keep dumping money into your account, even borrow some, but there is nothing there. The battery is no good, charge it, jump it and after you drive the car there is nothing there. Hopefully this rarely happens to banks but it does occur about ever 4-6 year in cars. Have your bank examined once a year.