12 volts works fine until the voltage drops below 10.5 during cranking and your MSD quits due to low voltage. Under normal circumstances this never happens. But, have you ever forgot to turn the fuel pump on or anything stupid in a late round and spun the motor over and the car did not start. Well it happens.

My reasons for going to 16 volts were simple. I liked the way new cars light the highway. My old bulbs do with 16 volts. I like the fans, water pump, and fuel pump spinning harder. I also noticed a battery voltage drop when turning high RPM with 6 large nitrous soleniods open. With a 16 volt system your battery is basically dead at 13.5 volts. So little things like MSD never get low enough to quit.

I had considered switching back to 12 volts. Then some things changed at work that made me rethink this.

We have many 12 volts systems at work that were simply giving us a fit. DATA radios eat battery like crazy. They have surge protection that eats .7 volts. So you loose .3 volts and people go crazy. Electronic guys will quickly catch on to why that would be. So when you are on backup you quickly can be under 11.8 volts and declining fast. 11.5 and the Radio quits. We loose power quite often in storms and just normal power company service work. We can't have the safe passage of our freight stopped because we are hard headed and stuck in a 12 volt world. We now run 16 volts on these systems. Just like race cars we have to be careful and not overcharge our batteries. Not due to the battery health but the equipment they feed.

Leon