i need some electrical help fast please!!

[zuni]

thanks everyone i got them in and there working great. i used the green wire on the stock dimmer switch to power my new gauges. however i grounded the ground wire to a bolt back in the dashboard that was connected to a big pice of tubed steel and it works great. thanks to you all once again.

Originally Posted by cre

I wouldn't recommend powering the EL inverter via the soft circuit on the back of the cluster. They're old, and were only designed with a certain tolerance above "normal" in mind. I've seen them burn up from people simply tapping one line for a few additional LEDs.

I also advise against anyone trying to use the stock dimmer's output (white wire w/ green stripe) to power and/or control EL gauges. There have been a few different revisions of the internals of the dimmer, none of which can support a much heavier load. Additionally about half the dimmer's I've see supply a gradiated ground and the others supply a gradiated positive signal (these are a potential divider. Simply put, if your ground is at 2v and your + is at 12v the circuit in between actually sees 10v.). Also, if you've got the latter of the two the scale is the opposite. A light fed a + from the w/g wire will brighten as the rest of the gauges are dimmed.

A further reason not to use the dimmer's output as a positive signal is that you may create a low resistance ground path for the rest of the gauge lighting and the dimmer. Depending on which type of dimmer you have you can damage the dimmer or the newly added device.


To wire them to come on with the taillamp circuit supradaddy0803 is right, use the solid green wire which supplies the dimmer for your positive and the white wire w/ black stripe for the ground.