amps too hot to touch

last season I was having issues with my amps (2 jl6450's) getting too hot to touch. I upgraded my power and grounds (to 4 GA) and they are still super hot. The boat has 10 speakers (6 in the boat / 4 on the tower) plus 1 sub. Each speaker is on it's own change and the sub is bridged on the remaing two. I measure about 13.5V at the amps (and at the battery) ... what should I do now? thanks

Joe

Are the amps still playing? If so, don't worry about it, JL has a protection mode that will shut them down if hot.

Are both amps roughly the same temp? do you have the bridged channel (sub) wired showing 2ohms?


you could also turn down the gains.

You NEED to add fans to cool them. Amps will only survive so many times of them shutting down from an overheat then something inside will fail, fans, fans, fans

How are the amps mounted?

One mistake that I have seen a few times is that people fasten the amp down over carpet, and then the pile of the carpet blocks the airflow into the amp. You might want to consider makeing small pads at each of the mounting spots to space the amp up away from the floor/hull/bulkhead so that air can flow underneath it.

As Bob said, putting a fan to blow across the amps can help a lot. You shouldn't need to blow a lot of air, so you don't need to get carried away. You might even consider tapping into the boat's ventilation system and routing some air via a vent hose to the amps. Just be careful that you don't route water to the amps, they won't like that at all

A cross flow fan will cool your amps very well. I would look at this one.

http://www.cardomain.com/item/STISF3N

I would worry more about air blowing across the top of the amplifier rather than underneath it. The transistors in the amplifier will be mounted to the outside/top part of the housing to act as a heatsink. The fan in the link above will work well, but you might be able to hear it running when you have the volume turned down.

They are roughly the same temperature ... looks like i'll be ordering a fan.

When I wire up the fan, I'm assuming I should use a relay and use the remote feed from the radio to activate the relay (same feed that tells the amps to turn on) ... right?

thanks everyone

Yes, use a relay. You might want to look into the fan controller that stinger offers. It is temperature controlled and will turn your fans on/off based on the temperature of your amplifiers. If you don't mind your fan running anytime the HU is on then a relay will work fine.

http://www.cardomain.com/item/STISFC

You may want to just rewire the remote turn on to ONLY turn on the that relay and it would then turn on the fans and the amps. The reason to do this is if you add even the small additional load of turning on the relay as well as the amps you may be over the 100 ma or so level many outputs are rated to.

You may want to just rewire the remote turn on to ONLY turn on the that relay and it would then turn on the fans and the amps. The reason to do this is if you add even the small additional load of turning on the relay as well as the amps you may be over the 100 ma or so level many outputs are rated to.




whats relay and what does 100 ma mean? i am installing a fan on my amps also

100ma-----your remote lead can allow throw so much power. some weaker units may have a hard time turning on a bunch of amps.acc , ect. My piece of crap kenwood manages to turn on 5 amps and an eq with no problem.

(Message edited by acurtis_ttu on May 31, 2006)