wireing driving lights

[voyager]

I mounted the same style of driving lights as Trip did ( value accessories) and read how you tied into the blue turn signal/ running light wire. I will put in a 15 amp fuse in place of the 10, but I think I will also put an inline fuse of 10 amps inside the head light bucket just in case. This way if the draw is too high, the inline fuse will blow and I won't loose tail lights. Plus, I finally got around to installing my new Cobra Slash Cuts, all I can say is WOW. That is some deep rumble sound, too bad I can't take her for a spin just yet, a bit too much ice and rocks still on our roads....

http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee302/voyagerkbc/nomad009.jpg

[unwind2]

This would be good info for Blowndodge's Garage board of this forrum. ;)

[Yellow Jacket]

It may not be a good idea to replace the 10 amp fuse with a 15 amp fuse. Even adding a 10 amp in the bucket feeding the driving lights won't protect the wiring up to that point properly. If adding the driving lights causes the original 10 amp fuse to blow in the fuse block I would recommend that you run a new wire with an inline fuse up to the headlight bucket to feed the driving lights. This is not really difficult to do and is a lot safer than putting in a bigger fuse.

Check out the thread "Replacing fuses" in Blowndodge's Garage for additional information.

[Top Cat]

Better yet put them on their own circuit. It is not that difficult. I did mine by following the directions on the Gadgets Page. Go here

http://www.gadgetjq.com/wiredrivinglights.htm

It even gives you a diagram http://s2.images.proboards.com/grin.gif

[trip]

Voyager,
Even though I have it documented to replace the fuse from a 10 to a 15amp fuse, I wouldn't suggest it.....in fact, I probably need to take that part out. Although I did change from a 10 to a 15 and never had any problems, you run the risk of damaging your wiring. I have since changed that fuse back to a 10amp and the lights worked just fine while I had them on. I finally had to take them off because the exposed wiring from the bottom of the lights, shorted out on me while on a Utah trip.

At the time that I wrote those docs, I had several guys emailing me telling me that they had swapped out their fuses for 15amp. Many of them ran that way without any problems. I tried it and although all worked just fine, I didn't want to take the chance of damaging any wiring, so I switched back.

Trip

[cactusjack]

Better yet put them on their own circuit. It is not that difficult. I did mine by following the directions on the Gadgets Page. Go here

http://www.gadgetjq.com/wiredrivinglights.htm

It even gives you a diagram http://s2.images.proboards.com/grin.gif

Or, you can do like I did this weekend, and wire up an accessory fuse block to make adding electrical accessories much easier in the future:

http://kawanow.proboards77.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1203296999

Right now, it's only powering driving lights, but I plan to add other accessories down the road.

I wouldn't be concerned about drive lights overloading the circut. A 60 watt light bulb pulls 1/2 an amp.

[Yellow Jacket]

I wouldn't be concerned about drive lights overloading the circut. A 60 watt light bulb pulls 1/2 an amp.

That's correct for a 120 volt bulb.

Watts = Voltage X Current. Therefore 60w = 120v X .5 amp

If you want to solve for Current the formula becomes:

Current = Watts divided by Voltage

Since the voltage on the Nomad is 12 volts not 120 volts you get this result:

60 watts divided by 12 volts = 5 amps

If you want to get real technical, a 12 volt lead-acid battery actually develops 13.2 volts. So two 30 watt bulbs running on a fully charged 12 volt battery would really draw 4.5454 amps. If the engine is running and the alternator is developing 14 volts the draw would be 4.285714 amps.

In any case that's nearly 10 times .5 amp.

thanks bob. Most of my electrical knowlegde is dealing with 120V AC.

[Yellow Jacket]

No problem wolfman. The main thing is that the lower the voltage the more current is required to produce a particular wattage. That's why some of the big power lines run 100,000 volts or more. They can transmit a ton of power with low current over the lines with out generating a bunch of heat. It's the current in a circuit that generates the heat. The heat generated is a loss of power so the power companies naturally want to reduce the loss.

That may be more than you wanted to know, if so forgive me.

Since we're billed by the killowatt hour I always figured we were paying twice as much for our power running 120. The rest of the world seems to be on 220-240 V. no?

[Yellow Jacket]

Well, we are using twice the current at 120 V than an equal wattage at 220 V but the wattage is the same so we're not paying twice as much. You're right about most of the world, or at least Europe, using 220-240V. I think some of S. America also but I'm not sure.

One disadvantage to the higher voltage is that your shock hazard increases with the voltage. It only takes 40-50 milliamps of current to kill you. The higher the voltage the easier it is to reach that current level in the body.

I'm not sure why the U.S. settled on 120 volts as the primary household voltage. Perhaps safety reasons? I do know that we use 60 hertz (cycles/second) here in the U.S. for safety reasons while most of the European countries use 50 hertz. One of my professors at Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering said that was because 50 hertz is very close to the electrical signals in the human body, such as what the heart uses. He said that a 60 hertz electrical shock was safer than a 50 hertz shock. Personally, I think all shocks stink.