What Should A Car Battery Read When Off. When the probes touch the terminals while the car is off and the battery is resting the multimeter display should show a reading of 122 to 126 volts full charge. Then the leads are connected to the battery terminals positive to positive and negative to negative to get the voltage.

A fully charged battery should read about 125 volts when the key is in the ignition and turned partially but the cars engine is not running. To get a true voltage reading of the cars battery it is important to measure the voltage after the car has been sat for a period with the engine off preferably overnight this provides you with the car battery open circuit voltage or also know as the resting voltage. As mentioned above there are many ways to interpret a car batterys capacity 50A per hour or 25A for 2 hours to name but a few.
12 Volt Battery Reading as 13 Volts.
How low does Car Battery have to measure before it is good. Look at the voltmeter on the dashboard of your vehicle. A fully charged car battery voltage should be 126v or above this is with the engine off. There is a very big difference when a car battery drops even a small amount of voltage.
