Toyota Sienna Forum - siennachat.com banner

Minimum CCA Battery to start

19K views 8 replies 8 participants last post by  martindtjr 
#1 ·
#3 ·
The battery is 5 years old and cold weather didnt help. I sense the starter was struggling a bit. After 2 week, I can't start the car. I tried to use my portable jump starter ($40 from Amazon). That couldn't get it to start. I had my bro give me a jump and got a new Interstate Mega Tron Plus battery.

Want to get another jump start the can start my car in COLD weather. Not sure how much CCA I need. The Interstate battery I got have 800 CCA. I know it's an over kill. Don't want to be stranded on a cold day. thanks
 
#5 ·
I just replaced the battery in our 2013 with a 700 CCA Interstate battery I picked up at Costco. The battery in the car must have been the original battery (any stickers on the battery were likely power washed off of it since it was completely bare). And since I got the Sienna used this last summer, there is no telling how the original owner might have abused the battery.
 
#7 ·
Can anybody shed some light on how they rate these things?

My wife bought me one for my birthday which is rated at 44.4 wh. Costco has one that was considerably cheaper with 19.8 wh. What the heck is a watt hour and how does it apply when looking at these thing?
 
#8 · (Edited)
Bear with me, as this isn't easy to explain....

A watt-hour rating is for the total capacity of the battery. You get that number by discharging it, meaning you've consumed every last drop of available energy from it. These batteries are compact, way smaller than your car battery, so their capacity is small by comparison. Your car battery might have a rating of a hundred watt-hours by comparison. So buying a higher capacity compact jump starter is probably the way to go.

Now, what's that mean for available cold cranking amps? Hmmmm Now what you want to know is what's the sustainable power (or amps, if you divide by voltage) you can get out of the battery, and for how many seconds you can withdraw at that rate. That's different from the first second peak power. And at what voltage, as the faster you pull amps, the lower the output voltage drops. That's going to largely depend on the battery technology, and how many times you want to be able to do this without permanently destroying the battery. And then there's the temperature issue, as all battery types have different temperature responses. That higher capacity battery might really blow at freezing, while the other might be better. The math gets murky, because you probably don't want to discharge at even half the max rate, if you want to use it more than once or twice without killing it.

The net here is that the numbers are hard to relate to real world output....

Water analogy: You can have a big tank or a small tank, pressurized to the same level. You can hook up a garden hose to either of these, or a fire hose. And then you've got varying hose length. And possibly kinks in the hose....
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top