Originally Posted by
Painless
I've been doing some thinking around ideal voltage and other factors whilst I wait for my pelican case to arrive, looks like I should be getting it on the 20th.
I've decided to put together something pretty ambitious for my new setup, a total of 36 plates in three rows of 12, each row will contain 2 parallel sets as follows:
+NNNN- -NNNN+
+NNNN- -NNNN+
+NNNN- -NNNN+
The pelican case I ordered is pretty big inside, therefore, I should be able to still have my preferred 1" space between each plate pair, I'll be sticking with the zip tie thickness (thin side of the strap) as my pair spacing. I'm also retaining packing each row in plexiglas to reduce the current leakage as this seems to work very well.
After some research, it seems that I have about 60 amps to safely play with from my alternator, I'm going to go shy of this and go for a maximum of 50 amps for my setup. I was looking around for relays and breakers that would handle this kind of load, but decided to split the load instead through two sets of breakers and relays rated at 30 amps using the same 10 gauge wire. I'm going to need one run of 8 gauge wire to my ammeter before the split, but that's it.
On another subject, I switched my ram over to full synthetic oil yesterday, mobil 1 extended performance (15,000 mile) and an appropriate filter. It will be interesting to see if this makes any difference to MPG or not.
I've also been thinking about a better air filter, something along the lines of a K&N setup. I can't decide if this is a good thing for MPG or not. The way I see it, a more efficient filter will allow more air in which will allow the computer to apply more fuel under wide throttle openings, this is surely a recipe for reduced MPG? But then, I also notice that my vehicles MPG is always slightly better when the weather is cooler (as in a cooler summer day, that is) cooler air is more dense, which will effectively have the same effect. Any thoughts on this?