ICE Power Issues

Welcome to the Power Issues guide! Here you should find all the resources needed to sort out your power related problems or thoughts. This guide should be continually growing as new things are found / expanded upon. If you find that something isnt covered here and you think it should, please let me know!

1: What cable to use.
So you've bought yourself a nice new amp. You now need to know what to power it with! To do this you will need to do a little bit of maths then look on the chart.

Step1 - The calculation...
Work out the RMS rating of your amp overall. eg. 2x100 RMS so you will need to work with 200watts. You will need to double this to 400watts as an average amps have 50% efficiency. So to make 200watts, it wastes 200watts (using 400 watts in total). Next you need to divide this figure by 12.6 (this is the average voltage of a fully charged battery). This will then give you the amps your amp draws.

Calculation (in general) - ((channels * RMS rating of channel) * 2) / 12.6 = amps drawn

In recap (using my example) - ((2 * 100) * 2) / 12.6 = 31.75 amps.

Step 2 - The checking...
You now need to think how much cabling you will need to run in the car in total for the amp (including ground wire). The table is in feet, so you need to work it out in feet.
Look at this table and find the draw of your amp on the top. (mine was 31.75...)

So 31 is closer to 30 so look down the 30 amp column. If you wanted to be on the safer side (better option), look down the 40 amp column. Keep going down untill you find the length of cable you needed to use (for mine i've estimated about 10ft). On the chart i stop at 11 becuase 9 is too little. Better to have more than less So at 11, a work across sideways until i get to the gauge number. In my case its 10.

That is the number thickness cabling you will need to get to work efficiently... As long as you dont run more cabling that the threshold, you shall be fine.

The following pages will cover the common power related problems, and how they are generally overcome.

Dimming Lights
When your sitting in your car, letting your stereo thump away you notice that the lights keep dimming... This can be quite a common problem thats easily solved with a power capacitor. These powercaps hold up the systems voltage by charging and discharging very quickly meaning that when you hit a low powerfull note, it fills in hte voltage gap in the power feed. This means you'll get a clean voltage in times of demand.

Overlooked Things
-- When uprating the power cables to run bigger amps, the most overlooked thing to uprate is the ground wire from the body of the car to the battery. This is part of the Big 3, read the section marked "The Big 3".

The Big 3
The big 3 is a major thing to consider when uprating your power cables in your car. By doing this, you should be able to reduce the load on your cars electrical system, and eliminate the associated problems!

Part 1 is to uprate the cabling thats often forgotten. It involves replacing a few factory cables (3!!) with something more substantial.

Wire 1: The ground wire between the battery and the car chassis. Replace this with at least a 4awg gauge cable.

Wire 2: Change the charging wire between the battery and the alternator. Again with at least a 4awg cable.

Wire 3: (Only applicable if your car has one!) Replace the alternator chassis ground cable with 4awg cable.

Part 2 is to uprate the alternator with one that gives a much higher output. This is important as when your car is running, the alternator is whats providing the power - NOT the battery!

So fitting a larger alternator means its feeding more power to your system! Wave goodbye to the lights dimming!

Part 3 is all about batteries. Although the major running comes from the alternator, if you run the system with the engine off or on tickover, your alternator will again not supply enough (or any) power to your system.

Using a standard battery is fine for short periods of time and average listening periods, but if you want more, you're going to have to upgrade...

A bigger battery not only has a bigger capacity, but they also provide alot more juice than the standard ones - so you should have all the power you need when you need it.

But thats not all, you can go about this battery upgrade it 2 ways - buy a bigger battery (optima yellow top for example) or buy a second standard battery and have a split charge system.

With a split charge system you have 2 batteries in the car. Your car battery can operate as normal, and be happy in the knowledge that your system cant touch it! The second battery is used primarily to run your system - so if you run it flat, you can still start the engine and charge it again!.

This works by splitting the charge cable from the alternator. One feed goes to your normal car battery, the second to your dedicated battery. Its that simple
! There are plenty of kits available that would do the trick for you...

Well thats about it. Plenty more will be added as things crop up, so keep checking back! If you feel something needs to be added, let me know!