New Sound system

[PeteIOM]

Howdy again!

My van is majorly lacking any kind of decent sounds.. The unit that came installed was pretty shocking.. only two speakers wired up although there appeared to be masses of speaker wires going into the back of the head unit. The speakers that were running were terrible little radio shack things.

Anyway... I'm installing a power amp.
I have a battery under the passanger seat which I think is the leisure battery and one under the driver seat, the main battery. I'm not sure which the head unit is connected to, although I do have to turn it on and off manually as its not conencted to the ignition.

Should I connect the power amp to the leisure battery and should I also maybe upgrade the leisure battery to a optima yellow top or something?

Thanks for any help.

Pete

[DiscoDave]

hi pete, it's well worth connecting your stereo up to the leisure battery, however i would avoid connecting the amp to the leisure battery and using it when you are camped up, the amp will flatten it quite quickly.

to find out which battery the radio is connected to, turn it on low volume but enough to hear it, then pull the -ve terminal off each battery in turn to see which one kills it. that will tell you which battey it's fed from now.

these vans don't have an ignition feed so one way to create one is to take a feed from the splitcharge if it's got one, or from the alternator output light, and make this feed flip a relay. then take a feed from the switched out put to the ignition on the head unit.

if the stuff about splitcharge doesn't make sense have a look on the wiki (link at top of page) there's loads of stuff on there!

as for upgrading the battery it depends on how well the one you have works! if it's in good nick then keep it for the time being till it either stops working or won't last as long as you need it to while camped up!


welcome to the club

dave