At 11:34 AM 8/7/2002, Rodney Woten wrote: >Doesn't splicing the new wire into the existing, smaller gauge, wires at >the plug, defeating the purpose??? Not really. It's not ideal, but as long as you stay within the amount of current that the smaller wire can safely carry without overheating it will work ok. Reason is that you're concerned with total resistance from battery to ground -- ideally you want the entire resistance of the circuit to be the lamp itself. That's not possible unless you're into superconductors, so you approximate it as well as you can. For a given current, a given size of copper wire will drop (lose, expend, turn into heat) so many millivolts per foot -- your aim is to keep the total waste between battery and ground to less than a volt, and preferably less than half a volt. A foot of skinny wire will only contribute a tenth as much waste as ten feet of skinny wire. The other places you waste voltage are at switch/relay contacts, and at connections. If you're dropping more than a few millivolts across a connection it's a candidate for cleaning up. If you're dropping half a volt in a twelve-volt (13.6 volt) circuit, then you're wasting about 3.5% of the total power -- about 7 watts in a 200-watt circuit. It doesn't sound like much, but a curious characteristic of incandescent bulbs is that visible light output goes up with roughly the fourth power of the voltage change. Unfortunately, bulb life (at least for a standard incandescent, not necessarily a halogen) goes down with roughly the *fifteenth* power of the voltage, so there's a very definite tradeoff. Folks who upgrade their wiring to get every possible watt to the bulb are going to be changing bulbs noticeably more often. david >If I could get to the terminals inside the plug, I'd rewire -- David Beierl - Providence, RI http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/ '84 Westy "Dutiful Passage" '85 GL "Poor Relation" |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.