hey i have 2 12" kicker L7's a 2000Watt american legacy amp and a 2.4 farad power acoustik cap im putting in my mustang but.... i seem to have lost my charging bulb for the capacitor does anyone know a way i can charge it without that maybe just hooking it up and testing the voltage to see if its the same that my battery is puttin out or what plz help
wat do u mean by 12v bulb? like for wat uses would one be like house or head light roof light sorry im confused u know wat i mean like wat the charging bulbs look like right the lil tube with a metal wire out each end
Just get a trailer tailight bulb, dome bulb....... whatever. Just make sure you get one that fits the socket(it has wires you know).
All you're doing is providing some resistance in series to limit current. The nice thing about using a bulb(any bulb actually) instead of a plain old low ohm resistor is that you can tell when your cap is pretty much charged. You could use a 110v bulb as well. It'd just take a very long time(more resistance) to charge your cap.
oh thank u cuz im hooking it up sunday and i was freakin out cuz i didnt know how to charge the capacitor untill i found this site i thougth id ask thanks for all your help fishy
Lol. I just thought of another thing you could use..... an old speaker. When you hook the driver up in series with the cap the cone will extend(in or out depending on polarity). When the speaker cone returns to the central position the cap is charged.
Why not just use a resistor. Much cheaper than a speaker. I wonder if I was the first to use the light bulb to charge the cap. It was a bit of a gample cause no one/manufacturers recommended it.
Too big and it'll take forever to charge the cap. Too small and it melts. The only difference between a light bulb and a resistor is one gives off light with the majority of energy still dissipated as heat.
Gamble?
If you choose a 12v bulb you can just about guarantee that the resistance will be appropriate yielding a rapid charge rate w/o meltdown, not too mention the added bonus of knowing when the cap is charged.
Manufacturer's recommendation?
Both this guy's cap as well as mine came with a bulb in place of a resistor. Can't get much more recommended than that.
That being said, the speaker was more of an example of another type of "resistor" that could be used than a practical suggestion. Heck I hear of some people using pencil leads to charge caps. Anything with a fairly low resistance that can take the heat will work just fine.
You've been lucky then, Fishy. My cap a while back, didn't come with anything. So I decided to try a 12v light bulb. And it worked. Ever since then, I've been recommending everyone to use 12v bulb.
hey we hooked it up today but we have a problem the car was idling and it just all of the sudden popped up and now idols way to high like 2k rpm's anyone know why this is happening? could it be an alternator???
i bought a mass flow sensor put it in becuz we unhooked all the sensors and it is the only one that did any change in the idle its runnin about 2.5k ish it usually runs 1.3 we unhooked everything so no power is runnin back to the system cuz we thought the cap is bad but we still dont know anything can someone help me out plz
nvm guys 190$ latter the dang capacitor only had 2 lugs the + and - and its suppose to have 4 i guess that one is for the middle of a few caps why i have no clue the beginning and end cap should have 4 terminals so it dont back feed well i was running one cap and it only had 2 terminals so it backfed and burned my computer, my mass airflow sensor, map sensor, and the heat indicator ugh! that sucks now i have no car for a week and a half for it to come in . all i wanted was a nice system!!!!!!!! but now im just gonna run a battery oh and the cheap a** amp isnt enuf for the subs rms is 750 on them well i figured its not true rated but 2000Watts should be enuf considering it was american legacy i didnt think it was gonna be that shitty its not pushin out nothing! them 12" L7's should be killer
hey i have a question i looked around to see if wat that guy told mys tepdayd it hsould have 4 terminals on the cap well i have seen none and i ran across a thing that said wire in parallel ??? i have the power wire to the + on the cap and a wire from it to the amp and then i have the other one to a ground just like the paper showed is that other terminal wat goes to the cap i was thinking that becuz like maybe it goes in one comes out the other and that is why it shorted all that stuff can someone plz help!!!!!! i know someone sees that like 6 more posts have been added come on plzz help