Vehicle grounds

Sound manufacturers recommend upgrading the vehicle grounds, on my 2012 regular cab, the very short ground ground going to the fender is at the most an 10 gauge and the longer one going to the block appears to be an 8 gauge . What's the consensus / should they both be upgraded or just the little one or not bother at all? I will assume that upgrading the grounds is always a good idea but will the benefits be too marginal?
Leonel

 

At no point should you ever replace the existing grounds. You should only ADD grounds if you're going to do anything.

Why do you feel like you need to upgrade your grounds? Are you running a massive amount of power?

 

He's running a 900/5 I believe. Its a decent amount of power IMO. Whats your reasoning behind NOT replacing a ground? Risk of corrosion or failure? Electricity takes the path of least resistance, so if you add a 4 guage wire then the stock wire will never help the load.... correct?

 

I'm actually surprised you would say this. Do you not do the 'big 3' on your vehicles when it comes to grounding to help improve vehicle chassis ground?

Can you elaborate more on why you wouldn't want to upgrade your grounds on the truck? Other than if you aren't running a lot of power its not needed.

 

Typically people end up replacing the stock grounds and like to pick new and innovative places. These places are typically worse than the stock grounding points. Toyota picked those points for a reason so it's best to keep them. If you plan on increasing the guage of wire but keeping the same points I suppose that's fine. Just make sure you use an ample amount of heatshrink to terminate the ends.

Path of least resistance is almost irrelivant at this point. The run of the wire from the battery to the chassis is very short. The impedance increases as the length of wire increases and also as the gauge gets thinner. But the resistance of both paths is essentially zero anyway. So long story short, unless you're running close to 1000 watts all the time you'll not likely need to upgrade it.

I myself also run a 900/5 amp and have run an additional dedicated ground all the way back to the battery. Do I need it? Hell no. But I ran it because I had the entire truck stripped down to bare metal so I figured why the hell not. Plus, it gave me a solid infrastructure to build on if I decided to increase power later on. My ground is 2 gauge welding cable.

And for whomever asked about whether or not I do the big three on my vehicles I generally don't. If you have dimming issues your problem isn't your grounds...it's the power source; your battery and alternator. Instead using the big 3 as an insufficient band-aid do the smart thing and get the upgraded alternator that comes with the towing package. That's what I did.

 

Reason I ask is because according to JL, you should upgrade those wires with 4AWG to prevent voltage drops when installing Amps with main fuse ratings 60A and up. not the grounding points , just the wire itself.

 

It's a good idea in the event you use all the power. But for the most part you won't use close to that amount of power. Most of the time you probably chug along with like 4 watts of power on your mids and tweets. You don't use nearly as much as you think you do. So yeah, if you were drawing 60A all the time it MIGHT be a problem but it's unlikely. Plus, every car is different.

 

What is the wire gauge of a truck body? Just run a #0 negative cable to the amps.