Amps and Volts

[dribfunk]

Sorry folks, I'm going to be doing a little DIY and I need to use a switch for some lights. However, the lights will be running off a 12v battery and the switch says about 3, 5, 15, 20 amps.

This has got me confused as my school days are years back.

If I was to use wire and blocks, what wattage should I be looking at?

Or am I just getting cross-wires, so to speak...

[oggy777]

hi, the question is a bit fuzzy. how many lights are you going to wire in? are u using a standard light switch (household type).

So you need to know the wattage of the bulbs you are going to use. Basically wattage is amps multiplied by the volts. Therefore amps is wattage divided by the voltage so if you had a 60watt bulb and a 12volt battery the amps would be 5 and a very dim bulb. Hope this helps

[dribfunk]

Thanks Oggy, I think I should've mentioned that they were going to be LEDs, a total of 10 banks.

I'll be using either a bank of toggle switches or a collection of push buttons.

Hopefully!

[qapmoc]

If they are LED's the power they take is almost nothing, maybe 20mA per LED (that is each individual LED not each complete lamp), so 50 LED's at 12 vdc would take a total current of 1 amp. So you can use almost any switch for this that you have to hand as even low rated switches will switch 1 amp no problem.