Hello
When we go camping we use a leisure battery which is 12 volts and 100 amp/hours. This is like a car battery except it is not damaged by being significantly discharged.
I've been able to perfectly run my Dell Laptop from this battery using a laptop car adapter lead with a cigar lighter plug on the end. It draws about 3amps and the leisure battery also charges the laptops own internal battery.
Now the problem! Instead of using the leisure battery I thought about running the laptop off the battery in my car. So I created an extension lead to stretch from the car to the tent. I used 6amp 240v cable, orange cable like they have on lawn mowers, and the extension is about 10 metres long.
This extension from the car powers the lights in the tent perfectly, but will not run the laptop. It appears that not enough amps are getting through and so the laptop does not recognize it is attached to an external power source.
I need 3amps at 12 volts to pass through the cable which is 10 metres long. I've measured the resistance on the cable and it is just 0.5 ohms.
I thought about Ohms law ie. Amps = Volts/Ohms, but that would mean 24 amps could flow though the cable, which just confused me further!
Please can someone explain what type of cable I need to use or how else to fix this problem?
Thanks
When we go camping we use a leisure battery which is 12 volts and 100 amp/hours. This is like a car battery except it is not damaged by being significantly discharged.
I've been able to perfectly run my Dell Laptop from this battery using a laptop car adapter lead with a cigar lighter plug on the end. It draws about 3amps and the leisure battery also charges the laptops own internal battery.
Now the problem! Instead of using the leisure battery I thought about running the laptop off the battery in my car. So I created an extension lead to stretch from the car to the tent. I used 6amp 240v cable, orange cable like they have on lawn mowers, and the extension is about 10 metres long.
This extension from the car powers the lights in the tent perfectly, but will not run the laptop. It appears that not enough amps are getting through and so the laptop does not recognize it is attached to an external power source.
I need 3amps at 12 volts to pass through the cable which is 10 metres long. I've measured the resistance on the cable and it is just 0.5 ohms.
I thought about Ohms law ie. Amps = Volts/Ohms, but that would mean 24 amps could flow though the cable, which just confused me further!
Please can someone explain what type of cable I need to use or how else to fix this problem?
Thanks