Ignition Hot Accessory Relay

Disclaimer*** I am not responsible for any modifications made to your vehicle, good or bad. This is simply a forum showing my solution that worked for me that I was able to do myself. I recommend with any uncertainty, that you have any and all work done professionally. The following is intended for use as a guide for self projects, or a resource for similar use. I am not a vendor or sales person of any kind. Use at your own risk.

Tired of running tons of accessory wires straight off your battery? I was, so I came up with a solution that worked out perfectly. Not only will this reroute your accessories, but will give you the option to make the ignition hot, and not draining power. The solution I was successful with was using a continuous duty solenoid.

For those who don't know what this is, it is very similar to your starting solenoid. Only it is made for continuous duty, obviously.

Here is what it looks like from the front:



(Yes I realize the pictures are huge, but it was that or super small)

How it works is, the two big copper looking bolts to the sides are where you connect your power source, and what you want to control power to (your accessories in this case). The two smaller looking silver bolts are used for a ground, and an ignition hot wire. I used the silver small silver one in the front (top image, bottom silver bolt) for my ignition wire. How it works is, once the ignition wire is given power (by turning on the ignition) a magnet inside of the solenoid will click, bridging the power between the two copper looking bolts, giving power to your accessories.

The wire here with the yellow tab is my ignition hot wire. We will start off by looking at where to run this wire.



For my 1st gen, I had to run this wire down through the firewall, underneath my dash. Drilling a hole may be necessary for some, however for me it was not. Important, remember to seal any holes you do drill, to protect your interior from the elements.



The picture above is showing where the wire runs from, under the hood to the fire wall. (I highly recommend attaching any butt pieces to wires at the end of project, and all wires have been run. This will prevent having to clip and redo butt pieces, do to not being able to run them through small holes.)



The picture above is where my ignition wire comes into the cab through the firewall, directly behind my clutch pedal. Next I will show you what you need to connect to this wire.



This is a minifuse with a wire coming out of it (no clue what it's real name is). This is commonly found, I got mine at Napa auto parts.



In the picture above it is kind of hard to tell, but i have put the end of this wire into the top center fuse in my dash, located next to the hood release lever. As you can see in the picture before this one, I have two fuses attached to this end peice, reason being is that the fuse block I used was to my interior accessories or "acc" (stereo, etc.). Since this is a previously assigned unit, you must use two fuses to do two things with it. I chose this fuse block, simply because it is ignition hot, exactly how I wanted it. This means that whenever I have my key on, and my stereo turns on, all my accessories I run to the solenoid will also be getting power.

Next I will show you how I wired the positive wire to the solenoid (super easy, most won't need help at this point)



This thick bright red wire on top connected to my positive battery terminal, is run directly to the copper looking bolt on the right side of the solenoid (in relation to the pictures previous). It does not matter what side of the solenoid you use, as long as you use one of the big side bolts, and it is directly opposite of where you wire your accessories.



Above is another picture of the solenoid, and the positive wire (on the right side). You can see I have electric taped wrapped around the butt piece. This is to protect it from any ground, such as the one right next to it. Seems like common sense, but when you touch a hot positive wire to a ground (negative) bad things happen. Like, potentially burn your truck down bad.

In the same picture above, you can barley see the wire in the back, with a blue tab. This is where you connect your ground. It is located directly across from where you connect the ignition wire (the other small silver bolt).



In the picture above, with the yellow tab, is the ground wire from the solenoid. No it does not matter if you wire your ground to the battery or another ground, I just chose the battery because it is an easy, obvious, reliable ground connection.



In the picture above, it is hard to identify, but looking at the large copper looking bolt directly behind the yellow tab ignition wire, is where we connect our accessories. You can see I have a gauge wire running to this spot, yes that is where you are suppose to look, and yes that is an accessory wire. It powers a high wattage amplifier, and is not the wire running to the battery.

It is extremely important to remember that this does not act as a fuse of any kind. All accessories should still be properly, and appropriately fused for your own safety. Too much time and money goes into these builds to lose a project to the lack of a fuse, so just do it right, or have it professionally done.

Feel free to comment and/or ask any questions you may have!

Thanks for reading!

 

It would have been much simpler to just install a second fuse block. They're about $2 at an autoparts store, allows you to fuse every additional circuit, won't risk a burn out, only adds 1 write to the battery as well. Iirc when I did the taco i mounted to the top of the underhood block and wired ofthe existing mai that fed the truckblock, so no additional wires.

Decent job and all but it looks a little overkill in the parts dept.

 

Yes but those accessories would be hot all the time. The power from this could be run to a fuse block to make all of the accessories powered only when the key is in the ignition.

 

I'm missing here a fuse between the solenoid and the battery. The main reason is to not burn the truck when something bad happens to solenoid (in accident for example). In my 4Runner I have added the fuse block for different things, and as a common sense it has 80A fuse inline the positive wire going from the battery.

 

you can use the relayed power source in conjunction with a fuse box

 

Yep. Easy enough to do. I'm always installing amps, lights, charging ports etc that for my needs are hot all the time. Then pull 1 circuit off to a relay and youre fused and switched with plenty of room on the battery posts for the winch terminal. Ezpeezy.