Hi,
I was wondering how to use my cigarette lighter to power my ISimple. There are two wires connected to the lighter power. A black and orange one, I am not sure how to do it with my little plastic splicers?
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Mike

 

Orange is the 12 V positive line. Black is ground return.

 

jaguarXKR, please, please, please do not use the plastic splicers. I can not tell you how many problems I have found from people using those pieces. They work great initially, but after a short period of time, they start creating all sorts of havoc. What I would tell you to do is to remove the plug off of the cigarette lighter and then if you look inside, you will see the metal pins that make the electrical connection. On one side of the connector, you will see what looks like a sliver of metal that is sticking out the side and going into the plastic. What you want to do is to use a very small screw driver (aka, jeweler's screw driver) and depress that sliver of metal as you pull the wire backwards out of the plug. Once you get the pin free, you can use a 20 gauge piece of wire and solder it to the end of the pin where the factory wire is and reinstall (do not forget to bend the sliver of metal back up first).

If that seems like too much work, then I would recommend using butt connectors. In this case, you would cut the orange wire a few inches back from the lighter plug, strip back about 1/4" of insulation from each end of the wire and on the side away from the lighter, stick that into the end of the butt connector and crimp it down. Then, on the other end, stick the wire going to the lighter in to the butt connector along with the new wire you want to add as your power wire to the iSimple. Crimp that down. This makes a much better connection. Please keep in mind that the butt connectors come in a lot of different colors and you are after the red ones which are meant for 22-16 gauge wires. You go with the blue or yellow ones, you may find that they won't crimp down to well and you will have issues with the wire pulling out. Along these same lines, crimping the living snot out of the connector can lead to issues too as you are damaging the wiring and breaking the wire strands due to crushing them. You want to give it a decent squeeze, but not overly hard. A simple pull test will tell you if it is on there well enough.

Any more questions, just let me know.