ELECTRICAL battery question!

Ramtin

Ramtin

Well-known member
hey guys!

can someone who is good at electrical side of things, tell me if it's okay to tap into the battery?

basically my plan is to tap into any 12 volt wire that comes out of my battery, my headlights in this case,
reason is i wanna connect a female cigarette lighter to it and mount it on my handle bar so i can use it for GPS, Ipod or etc...

would it take too much power off my headlights or would it be fine?

any tips on how to do this properly, would be appreciated as well :)


thanks for your time!
 
Hey there,

I would not splice into your headlight circuit as your accessory would increase the amperage of the circuit dramatically and you run the risk of blowing your headlight fuse, which could be very dangerous for night riding.

Personally for the slight increase in time and additional cost (of extra wiring) I would route a slightly heavier gauge wire directly from the battery to your female plug, fused with a 20A fuse, grounded to a chassis ground.

This makes the circuit independent from everything else in case your accessory draws a little too much current and blows the fuse. (car GPS's do this all the time)
 
^ +1 Not worth adding to the current draw of the headlamp circuit.

I find it handy to hook up a fused accessory cable that allows me to quickly disconnect the DC socket in the winter so I can charge the battery. The Battery Tender Jr (maybe other models too) comes with one. It looks like this...

140.jpg
 
I would wire it up with a relay switched by any keyed power source then power right off the batt with a fuse. That way your bike won't have a dead batt should you leave something plugged in.

Also princess auto sells that cable above for 2 bucks....
 
If you wire directly to the battery, even fused, it means that the 12V socket is always live....forget to turn off the accessory and say bye bye to the battery after a few hours.

Like someone said, a relay from a switched power source.

In laymans terms, you still have another set of wires coming from the battery but they go through the relay which gets a signal to send the "juice" only when the switched signal wires are live.
 
Agree with the 2 posts above, don't forget to disconnect your devices when the bike is off.

The only downside with wiring in a relay is that you can't connect a battery tender to it as-is. I suppose a by-pass could be wired up for use with a tender but I suspect the OP is looking for the easiest method that is safe.
 
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