Leaving your amp connected.

[Mexar 10+ year member]

Had a really cold spell here during the winter, and the amp decided to make some funny stuff happen to my subs when the car turned on in the really cold. I never EVER had a problem with my old RF amp, no matter what the temp was, so this was a new problem. Running a Vr2000D amp, didn't have time to putz with it and it was BLEEPIN cold, so I just unplugged the remote turn on and never touched the power / ground wires.

Now fast forward 4 months, installed a new HU, and decided I wanted my bass back, so I load the box back into the car, turn the amp back on and whammo clipped into protection. Turn the gains down a bit, plays good for 20 mins, turn the gain up a touch to get some bass again, blam, protection.

Turn it off over night, still in protection in the morning, drive for maybe 5 minutes, amp kicks on and I've got nice clear bass, then back into protection. It flipped in and out of protection about 6 times in 10 minutes (No where to pull over and d/c it again)

So what I'm wondering, is did the clipping mess it up bad, the cold weather screw something up internally, or did leaving the power/gnd wires hooked up for months and not using it fry caps or something inside (unlikely because it was never truly "ON" without the remote switch, but hey)

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[negative3five 10+ year member]

I've had problems with zenon based amps going bad from just sitting idle like that for some reason they would heat up on me. Maybe it was just a problem with my set up but I always atleast unhook the positive from under the hood, rcas and remote.

 

[kingtice22 10+ year member]

i had a massive 1500d do that 2 me before. it would play fine for like 5min then cut out for 5min the cut bac in then later down the line it cut out and never worked again

 

[99grandprixGT 5,000+ posts]

does your new HU have higher pre out voltage? did you try setting the gain with a DMM?

 

[bigaudiofanati2 10+ year member]

Are your subs wired properly? Just a thought

 

[Mexar 10+ year member]

Same pre-out voltage as the previous HU that was in there, and the subs never came out of the box, so the wiring stayed the same as they were before.

Another question, very simliar... I have an older Rockford amp that worked the day I took it out, it went into a plastic storage bin, for a year and a bit, then took it out hooked it up and it didn't work... any ideas on that too?

 

[cleansoundzz 10+ year member]

Sometimes the capacitors can go bad on an amp from not being used. Stephen Mantz from ZED Audio told me that about 6 months ago.

 

[Mexar 10+ year member]

Well, I re-did the wiring on my subs (put the DMM on my coils while I was at it, all good) took it from a 1 to a 4ohm final load on the amp.

Instead of putting both wires into the speaker outputs on the amp, I put 1 in each side (It's a mono amp with parallel outs... I think) and adjusted the gains. With the subs barely moving **** thing went into protection.

I think I figured out the problem, the amp is sensing overpower to the subs or something, and is turning itself off, voltage was steady at 14.1 with the car running. The only thing I can think of, is this box is a fair bit bigger than my last one (5.1 vs 3.8).

We'll try it like this for a while, but I might have to build a smaller box and put some more power on these bad boys, I'm only giving them about 300w RMS each at the MOST right now, and they can handle 750w supposively lol.

 

[lowriderram_95 10+ year member]

A friend of mine had an amp hooked up running all the power to nothing for about 3 months, hooked up some subs to it and it literally caught on fire

 

[MakeshiftAudio 10+ year member]

Too low of an impedance/resistance/load etc for the amp.

 

[Mexar 10+ year member]

So, I've been playing with this a bit more, no closer to knowing wtf is going on, but more information if it might help someone help me lol.

The amp doesn't fire up right as the deck does, like it should, it takes about 2-3 seconds after the song starts to put out some bass. The louder it tries to play, the faster it goes back into protection.

While it's in protection, the little red LED is solid and steady, the green LED is flashing about 10 times a second (Like flickering on and off, almost like it's constantly trying to come on but can't).

Also, some times it won't turn on at all, stays in protection, usually after an over-night sit, it'll come on, play fine at low volumes (longest test is 10 minutes), then when I turn the car off and back on, it won't turn on again until it's had a few hours to sit (the overnight part)

If it helps, I used to have it set by DMM running a 1ohm load, and it never had problems before. Changed it back to a 4ohm load now to see if that helped, nada.

 

[its_bacon12 10+ year member]

Well I hope you learned a lesson to take the amp out instead of leaving it plugged into power for 4 months while not using it.

Who knows what happened. Electronics do strange things sometimes.

 

[Mexar 10+ year member]

Technically speaking, leaving it hooked up shouldn't have been the cause of this. That's what the remote wire is for. but yea, don't really know what's going on, gonna pop the cover and check the caps in it, maybe replace 'em if there's nothing else obviously wrong

 

[joel_perks 10+ year member]

have you checked all the connections like ground and fuse connections because mine ground Wehr i gridded the metal crowded over the winter and as soon as it tried to consume any power it went in to protect

 

[Mexar 10+ year member]

Strangely enough, no external fuses on this amp, but I will check my connections again