Hello guys and gals! I have search the forum for days with no luck finding the info i need. Im looking to add an amp and sub to my 2019. Mine came with the 180amp alternator so my question is whats the highest wattage amp i could run without running into issues? I plan on doing an agm as main battery and big 3 upgrade with 0g OFC from the alt. I am looking around 1700rms is that viable or do i need to go lower? any other tips or suggestions are welcome! Thanks!
jtvercetti
Im far from an expert on all this, but I did wake up (come to?) at a Holiday Inn Express once, so here’s my opinion on the matter:
You will likely have issues such as headlight dimming on heavy bass notes trying to push 1700w RMS with an 180 amp alternator.
I have a 220 amp alt in my Charger(s), and the most I was able to push without issues was about 1500w RMS. Now, I have the halogen headlights, which isnt ideal, and I didn’t do the big 3 (that’s more difficult to do with the long run back to the trunk), but the one time I tried to push more (3 amps totaling almost 2000w), I had severe headlight dimming on the heavy bass notes.
I’m sure there’s a way to make the 1700w setup work, but it will have to be done right, I mean really right.
Also, I have a 220A alt on the shelf if you decide you want to step up to that size. It is used (came off my 2012 at approximately 150K miles), but it still works. I know shipping would be a killer, so I wouldn’t ask much if you want it. Let me know if you do and we can figure a price that will work when shipping is factored in.
Ouch. That is a chunk of change.
If you get to feeling industrious, $40 for my used one plus $30-40 shipping (my best guess, not sure there), and you doing the labor would come in a lot less than $900. Hint-hint 😉
I added another battery to chassis ground cable and separate engine to chassis ground cable on both my cars, and while that helped, there was still some dimming issues. I don’t know if upgrading the main power wire would have solved those, but it was always in the back of mind since I couldn’t ever do it.
Stock alternators should provide enough amps to run the car and charge the battery and have around 40% of their rating leftover after that. This is a very general rule, but in the absence of more information specific to this situation, it's a good starting point.
40% extra from an 180A alt would mean about 72A is available for something like an aftermarket sound system.
Using the 1700w RMS number as a starting point, and assuming the peak wattage rating on the amp(s) is double the RMS rating, that gives us 50% to use in the next calculation for actual current draw from the amps.
Normally, the sum of all the amps' onboard fuses can be multiplied by that percentage above to arrive at a rough estimate of how many amps the alternator will have to provide to power the sound system. Since we don't any amp specifics, I'll use some fuse ratings I've seen for amps I've run in the past - 150A.
50% of 150A is 75A, which is slightly more than the 72A estimation of available power from the 180A alternator.
So given all this, assumptions and generalizations aside, we can predict that trying to power a 1700w RMS sound system with the 180A alternator will be very difficult to do without signs or symptoms of low voltage showing up somewhere on the car.
For kicks and giggles, if we plug in 220A instead of 180A to see if the upgraded Dodge alternator would fare any better, we get 88A as the reserve number from the alternator available to a sound system.
Using the 75A estimate for actual amps needed to power the system above, the 220A alternator would seem to be able to do the job for us, certainly it has a better chance of doing so than the 180A alt, all things considered.
40% extra from an 180A alt would mean about 72A is available for something like an aftermarket sound system.
Using the 1700w RMS number as a starting point, and assuming the peak wattage rating on the amp(s) is double the RMS rating, that gives us 50% to use in the next calculation for actual current draw from the amps.
Normally, the sum of all the amps' onboard fuses can be multiplied by that percentage above to arrive at a rough estimate of how many amps the alternator will have to provide to power the sound system. Since we don't any amp specifics, I'll use some fuse ratings I've seen for amps I've run in the past - 150A.
50% of 150A is 75A, which is slightly more than the 72A estimation of available power from the 180A alternator.
So given all this, assumptions and generalizations aside, we can predict that trying to power a 1700w RMS sound system with the 180A alternator will be very difficult to do without signs or symptoms of low voltage showing up somewhere on the car.
For kicks and giggles, if we plug in 220A instead of 180A to see if the upgraded Dodge alternator would fare any better, we get 88A as the reserve number from the alternator available to a sound system.
Using the 75A estimate for actual amps needed to power the system above, the 220A alternator would seem to be able to do the job for us, certainly it has a better chance of doing so than the 180A alt, all things considered.
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