does ground and power wire BOTH have to be OFC 0 guage?

[akuma4u]

hey

i used OFC 0 gauge power wire for my amps power and i used plain/chinese brand 0 gauge wire for my ground..

is this ok?

or should both ground and power be OFC 0 gauge?

thank you

[Jessica]

ground is critical.

DC current in a car goes ground ----> positive.

[akuma4u]

ground is critical.

DC current in a car goes ground ----> positive.

ah... so i need to scrap the chinese 0 gauge and swap it out for true OFC 0g...

even if its for 1100rms?

[Life is an Enigma]

[Jessica]

for 1100? nah, 1100 draws like 120 amps at most. 4ga can handle that. But if you get the chance, go ahead and upgrade to "tinned" OFC wire. it will work better, last longer, not corrode and you will have peace of mind.

[akuma4u]

for 1100? nah, 1100 draws like 120 amps at most. 4ga can handle that. But if you get the chance, go ahead and upgrade to "tinned" OFC wire. it will work better, last longer, not corrode and you will have peace of mind.

actually its more like 1350 ,.. but soon to be 2300 when i run it at 1 ohm

so i should leave the kicker ofc 0 g power and chinese brand shitty quality 0g ground for now while im running 1300 @ 2 ohms?

[Jessica]

if you are going to upgrade, just get better wire. Go order so KNU tinned OFC. I know it is spendy, but its worth it if you dont like buying extra amplifiers.

i was going to post a whole bunch of stuff about how important wire might be. i'll save it unless you want to hear it.

[akuma4u]

if you are going to upgrade, just get better wire. Go order so KNU tinned OFC. I know it is spendy, but its worth it if you dont like buying extra amplifiers.

i was going to post a whole bunch of stuff about how important wire might be. i'll save it unless you want to hear it.

go ahead and post it.. no harm in getting better educated

ill be honest,.. all the guys in the shops told me that good brand/quality OFC 0g is good enough and will do the job.. this is the first time ive heard of tinned ofc..

[Jessica]

Tinned OFC will prevent corrosion, which will eliminate heat, bad connections and wire that just falls apart after long term use.

as for the rest:

0ga cca can handle about 200 amps on shorter runs and you probably will never see that on music.

I have seen so many builds draw only half what the amp could draw on music.

Think about an amp, it outputs AC power, so its a sine wave, so it sweeps up and down through a peak to peak. Most the time the amp is in between peaks. So the draw on the DC side is not going to be really high.

Sometimes it is a high draw though, and that is when you might run into issues.

If you play a lot of music that happens to be where you have very little impedance rise you might draw quite a bit of current.

Amps have internal power supplies and they have capacitors that even out power, they dont really "store" power, they just help flatten out the high and low draw cycles. The kind of filter the power coming in and regulate it.

Anyway, at the end of the day, you are just taking an AC input, boosting it on the input side of the amp, sending it to the real amplifier and increasing the voltage. Like i said, its a sine wave.

notice how house wring can run 115 volts and 15 amp, which is about 1725 VA? (Watts, sort of) EDIT: on 12ga wire

You cant do that in DC cause its constant and not alternating. That is why you tend to need a lot more copper to power DC things than you do AC things.

[hdorre]

If i were going to skimp on anything, itd be my power run. I like muh return path.