What Is a Voltage Converter?

Video Transcript

"We're going to talk about voltage converters, and on some vehicles we don't have them on this particular vehicle, but some vehicles will allow you to take the direct concurrent that comes, that eventually comes out of the alternator after course it's converted, to charge the battery you can convert it back to alternating current again and you can actually plug in your power tools and you can actually plug in your laptop and anything that runs on household alternating current you can actually run off of your vehicle. Of course, the downside to that is you have to have the engine running because the engine has to spin the alternator so that you're generating electricity and then it has to be converted again. So on this particular car and this is a 40 year old vehicle we have an alternator pretty much similar to what's on the current vehicles today except this alternator has an external voltage regulator on it which is right here with just a little relay type regulator that's in there. So what actually has to happen is that regulator prevents the alternator from overcharging the battery and from the current or the voltage going up too high in the car's electrical system so if it gets any higher than 15 volts you're going to start to damage a lot of the circuits, you turn on your headlights it'll burn out the headlight filaments, things like that so the regulator keeps that under control. The alternator which is really called a self rectifying alternating current generator actually produced alternating current and then that current has to be rectified or changed from alternating which goes positive, negative, positive, negative into direct current which basically has a square wave type of current pattern and that's regulated by diodes that are mounted in the back and a diode bridge in the back of the alternator and that's how that's controlled. We can go back and show you some of the old DC generators on some of the older cars but if you don't dealing with older cars you really don't need to worry too much about something like that and a lot of the older vehicles are even being retrofitted with alternators because alternators have the advantage of being able to charge when the engine is at idle speed whereas the old DC generators would actually show a discharge when the engine was idling and only charge when it was running. So alternator does a much better job of keeping the battery maintained. Remember you want to keep that battery charged at or as close to full charge as possible. Other thing I want to remind you about is that if you're going to let your car sit for a good time, a long time rather, I recommend that you have that battery cut off switch and also some type of battery maintenance system which is a very small charger charges about one and a half amps, there are several different brands available and you can hook that up to your car and you can just keep it plugged in and it acts as a battery maintainer where it will maintain the battery if the battery needs to be charged it will charge the battery then once the battery reaches full charge it'll go into what's called float charge mode where it just keeps it at a certain level and maintains the battery for you and that way the battery will last a long time and when you want to use your car you'll be able to jump in it and start it right up and not have to worry."