Hot wire

[toon80]

Hi guys,


I have bought a standard factory-made roll of 10 feet of cable for an AeroDynic 24EAH. Color-coded the right way and all.


Crimp terminals were supplied on the lightbar end but nod on the other end. I applied crimp terminal myself with the proper crimping tool. When I run the rotators (6), the red rotator wire gets very hot in about 5 minutes. Any idea on what's wrong? I am pretty sure I used the correct gauge for the crimps...


Thanks for your help!


Toon

 

[code4services.com]

I am not familiar with that particular light bar, but it sounds to me like the wire in question isn't a heavy enough gauge for the current. Do you know what gauge the wire is? I think it should be at least 14 awg. to run rotators. Again I don't know this bar, just my $0.02.

 

[dmathieu]

Is it a Federal cable? If not, the red wire could be the wrong size. In some cables the red is larger to handle the load.


Dan

 

[Abacus]

If I am reading your post right, Are you running 6 rotators of one red wire?

 

[wolfman]

If this is a 24EAH, they would be halogen lights, probably 50 watt. Six bulbs @ 50 watts = 300 watts / 12 volts (low end) = approx 25 amps for just the bulbs. Add the motor to drive the rotators, and you are probably close to pulling 30 amps on your red power wire.


You can find a wire sizing guide here on Brent's Wattco site:


http://www.wattco.net/infopdf/wireguagechart.pdf


If you got the correct Fed cable, the the red and black wires should be 8-10ga, other colors should be smaller sizes. That would be sufficient to run the bulbs and motor. If you are using anything smaller, you're definitely going to run hot. You should be fusing at the battery... what are you fusing your load at?


wolfman

 

[toon80]

I run the bar on a 50 amps variable 0 to 25 volts power supply, set at 12,5 volts.


The bar functions are operated through a fedsig SW300 switchbox on the self-resetting breaker switch no.1. Now, will the gauge of the wire (red) will be printed on it? I just run the bar and the amp-meter on my power supply shows approximately 21.5 Amps.


I also found out that the rotator wire have been spliced-in somewhere as shown here:


Power supply hot terminal --- SW300 --- red-factory wire ---- spliced red wire(not factory) --- factory lightbar cable --- AeroDynic.


------------------------------------------------- (warm)----------------- (very hot)--------------------- (hot near the butt-splice)


Ok, now. The wire used to manually splice ( making it longer, in that case) don't seem as big as the wire coming out of the switchbox but still don't seem smaller than the wire of the lightbar cable. One of the butt-splice connector is blue. I don't know if it's international color-coded but blue, around here, is 16-14 GA. Yellow is 12-10 GA.


When I crimped the ends of the lightbar cable myself, I used blue crimps for all the connectors but yellow for the rotator cable.


Seems to me the hand-spliced cable could be of the wrong gauge or wrong type but since that splice was there when I bought the switchbox (used) and it was likely on an emergency vehicle before, that hand-made thing should have done the trick (????) :lol:


Hope that helps you out!


Toon

 

[wolfman]

Well it sounds like you have power to SW300 to factory wire done correctly. I'd still throw a fuse on the main power cable to the SW300 as you can't always rely on circuit breakers for full protection on a higher-amp circuit 100% of the time. Normally the circuit breakers in the SW300s are 40 amps, so if you are running anything else on it I'd fuse the main power at 50-60 amps.


As for the spliced wire, I'm pretty anal when it comes to wire sizing. Even if I have a question about draw and/or distance I always choose a thicker gauge wire. Something you also might want to confirm is the cable inside the wire vs. the full wire size including insulation. Some wire has thicker insulation than others, so while it might look like a larger gauge wire from the outside, it could be smaller conductor-wise. If you can get blue crimp connectors on it, I'd tend to believe it was smaller gauge cable. I'd replace the spliced wire with a 10ga and check it from there.


I also hate splicing wires in more than one place, and if I can do a direct run from power to the device's connection block I do. Since you have a factory 10ft cable, see if you can get rid of the spliced connection and the 'old' factory cable and connect the new one directly to the connection block in the bar. As long as the new factory cable is at least 10-12ga you should have no problems.


Good luck!


wolfman

 

[toon80]

Update...


Well, I removed the non-factory added rotator wire and re-crimped it with a 10-12 gauge crimp (yellow).


It is not still not cool to the touch but is now pretty warm instead of pretty hot and it doesn't smell no more... :lol:


I guess for now this will have to do.


Thanks for the help and tips, everyone!


Toon

 

[toon80]

this is chwkman's exact aeroDynic cable I used.