Resistor Color Code Revealed

Understanding resistor color code is very important if you want to calculate the resistor values of a particular resistor. Each resistor color band represents a number where you could refer to the chart below to help you to find the standard resistor value. The chart act as a resistor calculator and with examples given, it would not take you a very long time to understand it.

Red, red, orange, gold = 22 multiply by 1 (orange equal to three zero), so you get 22 multiply by 1000 =22000 ohms or 22 kilo ohms with tolerance of +/-5% (gold).

Blue, grey, brown, gold = 68 multiply by 1 (brown equal to one zero), so you get 68 multiply by 10 = 680 ohms with tolerance of +/- 5 %.

Brown, black, yellow gold = 10 multiply by 1 (yellow equal to four zero), so you get 10 multiply by 10000 =100000 ohms or 100 kilo ohms with tolerance of +/-5%.

Yellow, violet, gold, gold = 47 multiply by 0.1 (gold at third band), so you get 4.7 ohms with the tolerance of +/-5%

Orange, orange, silver, gold =33 multiply by 0.01 (silver at third band), so you get 0.33 ohms with tolerance of +/-5%.

In electronic repair, most of the time i came across five band resistor color code. The purpose of using the five color band resistor in a circuit is that it provides a more accurate value compare to the four color band. For example in order to get the value of 22.6kohm, with four colors band resistor you will not be able to find it. The most you can get is 22k (red, red, orange and gold).If with the five color band you will be able to calculate it (red, red, blue, red, brown) the last color which is brown represent 1% tolerance.

If you open up an analog multimeter you will understand what i mean. Most of the resistor circuits inside the multimeter are using five color bands. Why? Because the reading that you get whenever you measure current, voltage or ohm, the panel will show the nearest value. For instance, if you measure a 9v battery the needle will point to may be 8.9v, 9v, or 9.1 volt. If that particular multimeter was designed using four colors band resistors the result that it gets may be 8.5v, 9.5v or even 10 volt. In other words the use of five colour band resistor is to make a circuit more precise and output the desire result as what the engineers want it to be.

If you come across any wire wound resistor, there are numbers printed on the resistor and each coding represents a resistor value. Below are the formulas that you can use to find out the exact resistor values:

R82 is .82 ohm, 15R2 is 15.2 ohm, 100R is 100 ohm, 10K is 10 kilo ohm, 2K7 is 2.7 kilo ohm, and 2M2 is 2.2 mega ohms. Hope you find this resistor color code article useful and be able to calculate resistor value in the shortest time.