INTERCLASS: How To Read Colour Codes in Resistor

A resistor is a passive two-terminal electrical component that implements electrical resistance as a circuit element. It’s ability to restrict electric current is various depend on the value of the resistor itself. In this article, we will learn how to read the colour codes in resistor to know it’s value. Enjoy!

The common shape of resistor is like the picture below :

There are 3 kind of resistor that use the colour codes, they are :

Resistor with 4 colour band with 1 colour band as tolerance
Resistor with 5 colour band with 1 colour band as tolerance
Resistor with 5 colour band with 1 colour band as tolerance and 1 colour band as reliability

To read the resistor colour codes, we can simply look at the following table, and it can easily memorized too!!

To help you understand the table, we can try to read a resistor like the picture shown below :

To read the resistor code, follow these simple easy steps :

Place the resistor in front of you with the tolerance band (gold or silver) on your right side. Sometimes there will be no tolerance band, simlply find the side that has a band closest to a lead and make that the first band.
The first colour on your left is the first digit ( Brown = 1)
The second colour is the second digit ( Brown = 1 )
The third number is the third digit ( Black = 0 )
The fourth colour indicates the numberof zero to add ( Red = 2 ) (Gold, multiply by 0,1)(silver multiply by 0,01)
The fifth colour is the tolerance (Gold = ± 5%)

Therefore: a Brown, Brown, Black, Red, Gold resistor would be a 1 1 0 00 = 11000 ohms with a tolerance 5%

This can be written as 11,0 K.

Here are some othe exmple to help you understand more about the colour codes in resistor