DC owners with seat heaters, what fuse location is everyone using for their heaters?

Thank you! That's definitely the most straightforward way to wire these up. If I don't do an aux fuse box in the shorter term, this is how I'll do them as well.

 

Will do. I do have the heating pads installed already. I put on seat covers and stuck the pads on to those. Just haven't spent much time thinking about finishing up the wiring until lately. Might have something to do with the drop in temps...

Anyways, I have a build thread where I've detailed the seat cover install and will add the seat heater wiring info once I have that done!

 

I've installed my seat heater pads, switches and doing the wiring now. This has been the extremely helpful. I see that you recommend a 10 gauge wire from the battery. What gauge wire do you recommend for the other 3 connections?

 

FYI, the heated seat sets that are readily available on ebay do not come with relays. They have an electronic controller. They are connected as follows:

Illumination - 16/18 gauge to dash illuminations circuit (I tapped in behind HVAC, same place I tapped in for flyz-eyes leds)

Ignition on - I just ran an add-a-circuit from the in-cab fuse box, ignition controlled. Cigarette lighter circuit will do.

Neither of these circuits will draw much current at all. They are not providing the power for the seat pads. You can connect both left/right to same wire.

Ground - my kit came with ground wires that had connectors I could slide right under a body bolt under the console and tighten up. I believe these were 14/16 gauge wires

Power - this will have to handle a lot of current. The wires provide were probably 12 gauge. Maybe 10 gauge. I'll have to look. I ran these directly from the battery, through the cab. I ran two separate lines, and installed a 15 amp fuse on each, closer to the battery.

Operation: "Ignition on" wire closes circuit on controller board (similar to relay) allowing power to flow to seat from battery. I'm leery about these controller boards. They seem to run a little warm. A mechanical relay would be a better setup. I have not heard of anyone's Toyota burning up yet, and a lot of folks installed these on their Tacoma's, FJ's, Camry's etc, so it will probably be ok. $90 for heated seats, plus a little elbow grease... not bad.

Also, I have Clazzio seat covers, so I installed the pads under the covers...

I did this in stages, too much to do in one day.

 

So, I'm the biggest procrastinator in the world and haven't actually wired up my seat heaters yet. I'm finally getting back to this, glad to see the additional info folks have been adding here.

yogster, i was going to wire this up basically as you described with some small variations. Wanted to see if you or anyone else have any thoughts on some of the variations i'm thinking of.

Ignition On - Similar to your reference of tapping in behind the HVAC (like flyzeyes), I was thinking into tapping into the same 12v wire that Flyzeyes recommends for this (green wire). I'm planning on splicing the 2 Ignition On wires from the seat heaters into that wire. This would remove the need for a separate fuse tap and you're then splicing the Illumination and Ignition On wires to the seat heaters from the same harness, just different wires. My assumption here is that the current draw here is minimal, so therefor safe to do.

Power - If I look at the specs of the seat heaters, each seat heater draws a max of 5 amps (30watts max per pad, 2 pads per seat heater). The inline fuse on the power wire on the seat heater is rated to 20amps, which to me seems too big? I'm considering swapping these to smaller 10 or 15 amp fuses. In addition, I plan on running a 10awg wire from the battery (or possibly from the power location in the main fuse box) with a 30 or 50amp inline fuse near the source. I will splice the main power wires from each seat heater into this fused 10amp wire, the size of the inline fuse here will be double the size of whatever i end up with for each seat heater inline fuse.

Any pros or cons (i'm more concerned about the cons) of what I'm thinking? I'll do a full writeup once done...