Hello has anyone tried to push that size through from the passenger side into the grommet leading to the battery? I had a heck of a time squeezing a 10 gauge through on my previous install and Crutchfield is telling me I need a 1/0 gauge to power the 400 watts-4channel amp and 600 watt mono D class subwoofer amp through a distributor block. Ordered the wiring kit but after looking at the grommet I just don't see how a quarter size wire will go through along with all the existing cables. Thank you for any advice.

 

I bought my car with a 1/0 wire through the grommet. You may have to open it up with drill or a screwdriver that you heat up with a torch.

 

they are telling you that so they can sell you a bigger kit. 4ga is perfectly fine for that.

 

Wasn't just them. I checked with a few local installers and they all felt it'd be a fire hazard if I didn't at least use a 2guage. The 1/0 I found on Amazon was $36.99 so I jumped on it. Thanks for chiming in guys!

 

lol. ok. we don't even stock wire that big because its unnecessary.

 

Met an installer yesterday for Polk audios in Baltimore who agrees that 0 is vastly overkill. He said he's never run anything larger than 4ga in a car. He did stress that the negative is far more important than positive and needs to be as short as possible. So much to learn

Be that as it may, my huge 0ga came today. Should I slit the grommet and try to push it through there? Or is there too much risk of it leaking into the passenger side?

 

If you go to Basic Car Audio Electronics they have wiring calculators. Their quick reference chart definitely suggests that 4ga is sufficient.
Personally I wouldn't use the 0ga - 4ga will fit through the grommet without cutting (though you will need to cut/unwrap the electrical tape),
but I can't imagine getting the 0 through.

 

Thank you oth. The 0ga wasn't hard after removing the battery and unwinding all the electrical tape. Carefully used a wire hanger and some Dawn detergent and it pushed through very smoothly. Didn't require cutting anything and now, I can add whatever I need to the system. Well worth the over-kill if you're going to expand.

Do you know if a Farad cap is necessary? I'm reading mixed reviews on its efficacy. Thanks!

 

personally i would have just ran two 4 gauge wire instead, easier to conform/position through tight spaces. as far as farad cap(capacitor) goes there's been plenty of debate on their usefulness. my take on them and from what i understand is that there is a very narrow band of setup or scenario where a capacitor is useful. the idea for adding a capacitor is to help alleviate the problem when the amplifier draws more amperage than when the alternator/battery can supply in moments of high demand. say when the bass is hitting hard and the interior lights dim, which can vary widely depending the song you're playing. the thinking behind this is that the capacitor would act as a reservoir to meet those peak demands. the first thing i had to figure out was how to convert farads(capacitors unit of measurement) to Ah(amperage per hour, you may be more familiar with mAh which 1Ah = 1000mAh) to set a baseline of what it would take to get say 1 Ah in order to figure out how big of capacitor one would need. unfortunately there really isn't a direct conversion for this but i was only looking into the feasibility of the concept. what i found was that capacitors is no where near suited for this task, basically you're looking at way over 100 farads to equal even 1 Ah. to put that into prospective the oem alternators output is 105 amps, a 500 watt amp would use a peak of 41 amps, and the largest cap ive seen are around 30 farads. overall if your sound system is consistently using more power than what the alternator is producing, a capacitor is not what you're looking for. does this mean capacitors are completely useless, the answer is no. they can help with really quick spike of demand but not continued demand. the main purpose of the capacitor is also to stabilize voltage not amperage. i know this will still continued to be debated but feel free to chime on anything i might have missed.

 

Thanks for your thoughts. So much to learn...