Need Help! Alternator Upgrade? Secondary Battery?

[covert313]

If I am playing rock my dimming is less, but if I am playing anything that has long bass notes it's dimming horribly. Currently my alternator is at 80a so roughly 1100 watts of output? When the battery was checked at idle I dropped to under 10 volts. If my battery is dropping that much the aternator is not enough to keep the caps charged or even the starting battery itself.

Will doing the big three solve this?

[Bluevitz-rs]

Originally Posted by covert313

If I am playing rock my dimming is less, but if I am playing anything that has long bass notes it's dimming horribly. Currently my alternator is at 80a so roughly 1100 watts of output? When the battery was checked at idle I dropped to under 10 volts. If my battery is dropping that much the aternator is not enough to keep the caps charged or even the starting battery itself.

Will doing the big three solve this?

You see, it won't matter what alternator you have in there, if you aren't spinning it fast enough, you aren't making any power. The alternator at idle is maybe making 2-5A of power, if that. You need to check while the engine is at 3000-4000 RPM, otherwise you'll never be generating enough power.

Your other option is to get an Overdrive pulley (smaller) on the alternator to make it spin faster at lower RPMs. This would bring it up to full power faster and would help a lot while just at idle.