Wiring More Stuff

PAINLESS FUSE PANEL CLEANS UP OUR WIRING

- Jay Kopycinski

AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRICAL is unmistakably important when it comes to the function of our rigs, but it’s sometimes not given our best attention. We get the hard parts installed, maybe sling in some wiring between power and switches, and then call it a day.

In our case, we had added some accessories over the years and had a handful of inline fuses for those items hanging off the battery under the hood. We’d not had a failure due to the casual fuse wiring, but decided it was time to clean up our electrical additions. We opted to use an auxiliary fuse panel from Painless Wiring to consolidate all our underhood accessory fuses. Painless offers several configurations to accommodate a given number of circuits, switched ignition circuits if needed, and waterproofing. You can choose a size that works best in your rig, or combine kits if you need even more elaborate power feeds.

We mounted the company’s seven-circuit, waterproof panel in a spot under the hood of our truck and used it to rid ourselves of all of the inline fuses we’d been using. The kit provided the feed wire to run to the battery, a main circuit breaker, and the wiring from each of the seven fuses. It’s a fairly straightforward installation and provides a good opportunity to efficiently route your wiring and protect it from the rigors of temperature extremes and vibration. The result is tidy, reliable power distribution.

Here’s one thing to note when doing this type of wiring. Since the same current flows around the entire loop, both positive power wires and ground wires must be sized to accommodate the current draw of the device. If a single wire is used to connect several devices to ground, then that wire must be of sufficient size to support the sum current flow of all devices. On most vehicles, the frame and body are tied to battery ground and serve as a large return ground path.