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Unread 21-03-2016, 13:18
philso philso is offline
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Re: Longer battery wires

Quote:
Originally Posted by natejo99 View Post
We lengthened our wires by soldering and heat-shrinking extensions onto the PDP side, in order to allow our breaker to be more accessible. I wouldn't recommend more than about 2 feet of wire total between the two, just in case you run into issues with too much resistance.
I would not recommend soldering 6AWG. The wire acts as a heatsink and you might not get the solder to "connect" to all the strands, giving you a high resistance joint. It would be better to use a proper crimp lug and crimper to make joints in wire this size.

The resistance of an extra few feet of 6AWG should not cause brownouts. The table linked below shows Maximum Resistances in the range of 0.38 to 0.50 Ohms per 1000 feet. Passing an 100 A current through 1 foot of 6 AWG should only cause 50 mV of voltage drop.

A more likely cause for brownouts are bad joints in the power wiring. These could be bad crimps or loose screws or nuts on the lugs/terminals. I found several teams with loose battery cable screws over the last week. One had their radio drop out both matches they used the battery with the loose terminal screw.