ICE Power Issues

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.