Now all car amps need 12 volts to power on. If you don't want to have the inconvenience of adding a long power cable all the way down your car into the engine bay, what you can do is connect it to the cig socket. This is only recommend by ourselves for small car amplifiers nothing big and fancy. If you are going for a high powered car audio system then its always best to connect directly to the car battery for best performance and less voltage drop. Now since you are going to connect the car amp to the cigarette lighter socket, you are making the installation process more easier for yourself. For a quick small powered install or to test out a car amp, its always best to tap into the cig lighter socket. Most of them are fused inline already, so if anything does short circuit your cars electrical system is protected just like a proper install. If you are going to go down this route, then ensure that you are using a properly sized power wire with a fused holder. We always recommend matching the wire size with the amount of power your car amp is going to pull. For small car amps that are rated around 100 watts rms for a little subwoofer, 8 gauge should work just fine.
1) Remove the negative wire from the car battery to ensure that nothing can get short circuited.
2) Pry out the cig socket from the housing.
3) Look at the back wiring of it, there will be two wires red power and black ground.
4) Solder the ground wire from the car amp to the outer ring of the cig socket. Followed by soldering the red power wire into the middle pin.
This will power and ground your car amp, all you need to do now is connect the blue remote turn on wire to the car stereo. If you don't want to open anything up then what you can do is get a unused cig plug socket from a old unused or broken charger or something and cut the two wires off from it and join the connection from there. The only drawback of doing this is that you can't use the socket at the same time to charge your phone or sat nav, as something is already in use and is plugged in. Well, i guess you could get an adapter that gives you two working cig sockets as a great alternative.
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