Enough electrical?

[GM4WALLS 10+ year member]

I am looking at running about 4500 watts RMS in my 02 Mustang GT. System will be used for music and dB Drag. The car is NOT a daily driver, it will be driven once a week at most. The car will only be used for music while running. I will only be hitting peak power occasionally for shows and sound offs.

I will be doing a 0 gauge big 3. 280 amp Mechman alternator, a big battery under the hood, and another in the trunk.

You guys think this is enough?

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[sexy 10+ year member]

There seams to be a lot of people asking questions about how much power is needed to run their systems. There should be a tutorial for the people to read through for this.

I am not sure how to explain everything but this is some of the stuff that ought to be said.

First off you need to have some way to test your system to see how much power it is using without guessing. Whether you do a simple test with a voltmeter or a dc amp clamp does not mater.

A cheep voltmeter can tell you a lot about how much power your system is using. You hook it up to the positive and ground at the distribution block or on the base amp. You run your system using as much power as you would when playing hard and see if your voltage drops below the 14.4 or 13.8 that your car was putting out before you turned on your system. If the voltage drops down to 12 or below and stays there that means your alternator is not keeping up and no amount of batteries will make any difference.

Why guessing does not work. You would have to have all of the factors of electrical properties considered to make a decent guess. Not just something like my owner’s manual says my amp puts out 1200 wrms or my amp has two 40amp fusses. That does not give you enough info to make a good guess. The 1200 wrms that your amplifier manual claims was not done playing music it was done with a tone at something like 50hz. It was most likely done at 14.4 volts if done right. Most tests done by manufactures don’t even use speakers they use a dummy load to represent 2ohms or 1ohms or whatever their specs say. The dummy load stays constant unlike the speakers in your car on music. The amplifier in your vehicle will only see the ohm load your subs are wired at for a fraction of a second when you start playing music then impedance rise takes over and the 1ohm load you had just turned into a 3.6 ohm load or a 7.2 ohm load or who knows what ohm load. You can test your box to see how much impedance rise you have but that test is way harder than the simple test you need to determine how much power your system needs.

Not having enough power from your alternator to begin with will multiply your problems. The lower your voltage gets the harder your amplifier works to try and keep the output up and that extra heat turns into more resistance thus more power is required from the alternator that is already not keeping up. most cars alternators put out 13.8 volts or 14.4 volts that’s a good bit more than a battery even holds. That extra couple of volts is crucial to your amplifiers life.

I hope some other people help me out with what I am trying to say here and it would be nice if some one could post a tutorial on how to know how much power is needed to run a system.

once you get everything hooked up you will know for sure how much you need.

 

[f1mclarenagr 10+ year member]

Holy wall of text Batman. I must have read the same line like 5 different times.