first, let me clearify something, i know very very little about electricity and wiring.

what im trying to do -

i have a new radio im attempting to get wired, but i need to do some things diffrently


1st, i know i have a draw some place and i will have a dead battery if i dont unhook it at night.

2nd, im trying to wire up a circuit off the battery for the radio so the memory will be stored.


i currently have the radio wired up off the previous radio, mostly. ground to ground, switched to switched, and an always hot lead from the radio to the batteries positive terminal.

i thought that would work for me and the radio would still be ground out after i pulled the ground battery cable. turns out it isnt.



i Td into the radios ground cable with another cable, and was trying to ground it out off of some place else in the car. basicly any place i could.

The Problem -

i was haveing no luck what so ever, so i said screw this, ill go to some place i know will work. the ground terminal on the battery.

with the ground battery cable unhooked, i laid my radios Td off ground cable on the terminal and all the lights came on in the car, as if i had the battery cable still hooked up.

now, maybe thats how things are supposed to work, but i cant imagine thats right, or a good thing either.


heres a schematic of how things are wired up right now. just click on it for a bigger image.



any help on this would be appreciated.

 

Fix the draw, then you can hook up the radio properly.
I'm sure there's lots of posts on how to track down that fault.

 

theres so many places that its at, it requires an entirely new harness. my current one has been hacked, cut, and spliced god knows how many times.

 

when you connected the power and ground to the battery you had it connected into the main harness thru the always hot connectopn, so when you connected the radio to the battery it backfed back into the harness. Stop where you are and go thru Rogers battery drain proceedur. Not doing so could very well cause a fire.

 

thats what i was thinking.

seeing as i just learned a rather important lesson, that my dad neglected to mention when i started this whole thing (theres nothing grounded on the car after you pull the ground cable off the battery) is to slip a ring terminal on the battery post and attach that to the ground of the radio. this way when i pull the battery cable ill still have the ground wire for the radio connected to it.


i shouldnt have any problems with doing that, should i?

and yes, i do know i need to find out where all its draining out of, but i dont have time to take on that task right now. i just want to get this radio working correctly, and ill deal with the drain over winter.