Spare Battery

If you had a spare battery could you hook it up like a capacitor?

Not really. If you hooked up a spare battery in line with the power for the amp, you would be doing some weird things to the electrical system. You could hook up another battery in parallel in the system, thereby keeping the 12v but doubling your available amperage. You can buy cheap trunk-mount battery kits from places like SummitRacing.com . I did this in a car to put a second battery in the trunk and then I ran my power lines off the second battery. The response was much better since I wasn't drawing so much amperage from the front using 4ga wire. You can also install the rear battery on a solenoid that shuts it off when the key is off. An even better idea is using an isolator. What this does is allows electric to flow one way through the isolator. The alternator will charge it, and if you leave the lights on, it won't drain the spare battery and it now becomes a jump starter.

Not really. If you hooked up a spare battery in line with the power for the amp, you would be doing some weird things to the electrical system. You could hook up another battery in parallel in the system, thereby keeping the 12v but doubling your available amperage.


um, that's exactly what you do with a capacitor

if you hooked up another battery in series with your current battery it would give you 24-28v. this isnt nessicarily a bad thing. higher voltage allows for a more effecient electrical system. problem is you have to change all assesories to assesories that iwll handle 24v :uhoh: . wireing in two batteries in paralell will double amperes avalable. but there is a problem there also. if the two batterys dont have the same exact ratings there will be drainage from the stronger battery (ampere wise) andeventually kill it. two ways to over come this. get two batteries that are exactly the same or put diodes into the circut so that current can only flow one way. problems with diodes? well they ovver resistance which will hut electrical system eficency. your best bet is to get 2 6v batteries with a high CCA rating and hich constant amere rating and wire them in series. you will have 12-14v and will have more avalable amperes. still having a shortage of amps? wire 4 6v batteries in series/paralell.

Its more trouble than its worth. I will just get an optima battery. That should keep my system working. Thanks for all the help.

you cant do it in series, it would totally fry all the cars wiring. Not a good idea. Just get an optima, or do a trunk mount thing in parallel with the existing battery.

guys guys, where did he EVER say that he wants to hook it in series? Everyone who's responded to this thread has said "you can't do it in series, it will be a bad idea, do it in parallel instead"....but in the very first post he asked about hooking it up like a capacitor, that's parallel, not series. I don't know where series came from but it was never brought up by the original poster.

Thanks for getting my back. So hooking it up parallel would be cutting the power wire to the amp and hooking it to the positive on the battery then from the positive of the battery to the positive on the amp. Would this give it extra energy so the lights do not dim.

exactly, and the neg on the batt would just be grounded to the chassis like with the amp's ground. You would have a deeper reserve, and a stronger skin charge with the pair, so it definitely has the ability to help out with dimming. Like curtis said though you'll need an isolator. If you haven't done so yet, you might want to look into upgrading the magic 3. If you have a dimming problem it's a good choice, it might not fix it entirely (it did with my system, but every car is different), but it will definitely help.