Electrical guru's!

[Omega]

My aftermarket gauges are doing some WEIRD shit. A few months ago I bought an air temp gauge. The sender is mounted in the Al elbow, but I added a ground strap directly to the battery. The power for it was hooked into the parking lamps. Whenever I turned on the headlight/parking lights, the air temp would jump up 30-40 deg. I figured it was from where I got the power source from.

Fast forward to the EGT/FP gauges (both electronic). I moved the power wire from the lamps to the cig lighter fuse. I am getting the same problem!! What the hell is going on here!?

There is a .3V difference with the parking lights on, but there seems to be nothing I can do about that. I can't try it with the engine running because it is late and the exhaust is laying on the floor.

HELP!

 

[ArticNemesis]

Last time i checked, you weren't supposed to ground anything to the battery.

 

[GalantGSR91]

Originally posted by ArticNemesis
Last time i checked, you weren't supposed to ground anything to the battery.

that's the problem...you're fooling the sensors by grounding it to the battery. grind the paint off of a spot somewhere and ground it there. Cleans up the wires and gives you a PROPER ground. that should take care of it. Also I'm pretty sure you'd want to use a different source other than your lights or cig. ligher for your gauges. Cig. lighters are good for volts guages though.

 

[Omega]

Um. HUH? Don't ground to the battery? How do you think the chassis gets grounded?

I figured out the problem. I had some wires backwards. The way I had it hooked up, the guages should never have even worked! I hooked them up directly to the battery at one point so I knew they would work properly

 

[BoostedSpyder27]

Originally posted by Omega
Um. HUH? Don't ground to the battery? How do you think the chassis gets grounded?

I figured out the problem. I had some wires backwards. The way I had it hooked up, the guages should never have even worked! I hooked them up directly to the battery at one point so I knew they would work properly

doode just take that battery ground off man.............
just get an electrical o-ring a groung it to a bolt under your dash or something..........thats what i did.....dont have a problem on either of my cars!

 

[laserblue]

Omega,
Good.... I'm glad that you found your wiring error. As far as where to get the 12v from -- any source [even the cig lighter] is okay to use, since the gauges use very little power. Of course use a source that is switched on with the ign key. And for the ground -- bolting the wire to any clean metal [chassis ground] is fine. Running the wire back to the neg battery terminal will not hurt anything even though it's inconvenient to route the wire all the way there. I guess that a convenient grounding point would be the ground that connects to the cig lighter, since you already have the 12v supply wire there. That would keep the wires neater...errr - more neat.