I'll try to make this simple. I have a nice Pioneer CD/MP3 player, but reciently the remote turn on wire has been acting up. Under hard acceleration it will cut out, or just at any random time. To fix this i ran a wire directly from the battery through a little toggle switch and connected it to the remote turn on wire, from what i remember i the remote turn on is just a 12V current so i figured this would work. Everytime the power would cut out of the remote turn on coming from the CD player i would just flick the switch and all would be good again... up until last night. I had the switch on and all of a sudden the amps cut out again. I didn't know what was going on so i felt the switch and noticed it was really hot. I tried to turn it off but it was burned out and automatically switched back on. Then it started smoking, so i hurried up and pulled on the side of the road, ripped my sock off and tried to hold the switch in the off position. Then it poofed into a little flame, i hit that out with the sock, and finally all the insulation around the wires for the switch was completely burned away and the wires broke on both ends, so i just pulled the whole thing out. My question is what did i do wrong? I know its not the greatest idea running the remote turn on wire through a switch like this just for practical reasons, but why would it burn up like that? The gauge of wire going through the switch was no smaller than that of the actual remote wire... The only thing that was different this time than any other was the car had been running for about 3 hours already. I have 3 amps that this is feeding..., i don't know. Any advice/opinions are appreciated. I just want to rig it up like it was for now until i can get a new deck, just not sure i like the idea of having open flames in my car.

 

If you were going to do that you shouldn't have ran a wire with a switch as a spare. You should have ran a wire and put a fuse block in it and you would have been fine

 

first thing you did wrong is you didn't fuse the wire you ran. ANYTIME you run a wire that will be carrying current it needs to be fused as close to the battery as possible.

More then likely you have a short in your original wire. Most decks are made to turn off pwr to the remote wire in the case it is drawing too much current. By wiring it the way you did when the original wire shorted out(turning off the amp), and then turning on the switch you have that wire shorted as well. Now the remote on the deck has turned off but the wire you ran is still hot. It would be like taking the wire you ran and going straight from the + to the - on the battery.

Check ALL your wiring. I don't mean take a quick look, I mean start at the amp and check everything from back to front....

 

thanks for the help, guess i got to take aday off and check everything out... what a pain.

 

I run a remote switch to my 4 sub amps and never had a problem.You might want to use a relay for your amps and fuse it of course.