A simple yet difficult question about caps vs. powercores

[mhyde71]

www.powerbastards.com

[eulogious]

I have (3) 2000 watt class A/B Tarantula amps and they suck a lot of current. I am using my STOCK 90 amp alternator. No one needs to really upgrade their alternator. Maybe to recharge your battery faster... As soon as your amps draws more current than what your alternator puts out, your battery then takes over. That is why your lights dim when your system hits a low note. Your alternator puts out around 13.4 ish volts warm, while your battery puts out 11.4 ish volts when power is being drawn. As soon as your system consumes more current then what your alternator puts out, your voltage drops, then dim lights occur, cause it is at a lower voltage... That is why you don't buy an amplifier that it's power rating is at 14.4 volts cause, it will only see that at a cold start up and as soon as you turn it up, your vehicles voltage drops and your amps output will drop, unless the amp has a regulated power supply... So, if your electrical system is having a hard time, at a heavy bass note and the voltage will drop in the 10 volts area, you NEED at least one more battery. I have 3 batteries with a cheap 25 farad capacitor... Rule of thumb, 1000 watts of class A/B amp you need 1 farrad cap. Digital amps needs about half that capacitance.

I guess the bigger issue to me isn't draining the battery, it's killing the alt. Buy not upgrading it you are overworking the alt, and that will cause premature failure. Period. I have seen at least 3 alts give out WAY before they should have (less than 20,000 miles on a new, not reman unit) because it was too small for the system. Sure any charging system can handle a big draw for a little while. But something will fail sooner rather than later.

I don't know about you, but I have a car to get me places and I need it to be reliable. My car is not a giant, expensive pair of headphones. It needs to do more things than play music, like get my family and I safely from one place to the next. By having a weak charging system and a large system drawing lots of current, it makes my car very unreliable. For most people/cars I would think that this is the case as well, and by not upgrading the charging system, you will cause problems down the road. Some vehicles have better stock charging systems (better grade parts, more amps, etc) than others, but a majority of cars will have more problems than not if you don't upgrade the charging system along with batteries and caps.

It's cool you haven't been affected by it and that you can use your car as a pair of headphones and not worry about how reliable it is, but you are an exception to the rule

[joerg]

For my last install i used 5 Optima 850 red-top´s and all i did to my alternator was changing the cowls. Worked fine from 2003 to 2007. And the guy that has the car now still doesn´t have a problem with it.

[Virtue]

Nice to see someone else who had done the same thing with good results. I too have the Red Top Optima batteries, but, I mentioned the Blue one because I remember reading that Optima will not warranty their Red batteries if they are being used for a large sound system... The Blue one are designed for that. I actually have 4 Red tops, one under my hood and 3 in the back.

Thanks for the link on larger alternators. They are hard to find up here.