does a farad capacitor help with not taking so much power out of the car battery?

Question

if so, how many farad capacitors do i need if i have a 1000W amp and two 12" subs?also how many watts should each one be for a good or decent one?

THANKS!!

will a farad cap also help with not letting my amp "burn out" or overheat as fast?

will an "HO Alternator" work better than a farad cap?

Answer 1

The purpose of the capacitor is to smooth the current draw of your alternator. For example the song you're listening plays a loud bass note for a brief moment, that will draw a lot of current causing your lights to dim. With a capacitor the draw of current flowing from the alternator is slower giving it time to balance the current of your car avoiding the lights to dim. the HO will increase your alternator current capacity but the effect of he capacitor will be the same. Another use of capacitors is to make frequency filters. Depending of the connection caps can be used to block high frequencies to your subs or to block low frequencies to your front speakers.

Answer 2

Not exactly. What a capacitor does is store unused energy, so it will still be drawing power from your battery, but it will be drawing it from the battery smoothly. All the hits your subs make will draw big amperage, and a cap will keep that big amperage draw from coming out of the battery all at once. It will come out of the cap instead. This is nice if you are running big amps and subs while driving down the road with your lights on and the A/C going and everything else your car's electrical system supports.

A way to think about how a cap works is this:
Let's say you want a drink of water. You get a glass, fill it up and drink from it. Then you go back and fill the glass up again. In this example, you are the amps and subs, and the glass is the battery.

In the next example, you are the amps and subs, the glass is the cap and the faucet is the battery: Imagine you have a straw and you are drinking from the glass with the straw, and the faucet is filling up the glass at the same time. Even though you are drinking water, stopping to breathe, then drinking some more, the faucet fills the glass at the same speed.

You should be able to run just a single 1 Farad cap on your 1000w amp and have enough leeway for future upgrades.

Good luck!

Answer 3

While the vehicle is running, power isn't being drawn from the battery under normal conditions. All the power for the system should be coming from the alternator. The only time there will be any power flowing from the battery will be when there's a current demand that's too much for the alternator, or when the engine is not running.

If there's a sudden, brief demand for extra power, the current can come from the capacitor and prevent the alternator from being overloaded and dropping the output voltage. However, it can only keep this up for a VERY short time because capacitors don't really store very much power. You can get larger capacitors, but the bigger ones have a higher internal resistance, which means they'll suffer an immediate voltage drop if there's a high current demand.

Furthermore, while it may soften a peak current demand from the alternator, a capacitor can't create power on its own; any power that comes from the cap will have to be restored by the alternator eventually. A capacitor can help prevent a voltage drop during a musical peak, but it's not really reducing the work load for the alternator on average.

All in all, for a system being used mainly to play lots of bass, it's unlikely a capacitor will help enough to make an audible difference in the bass output, nor will it protect an overloaded alternator from damage over time. Capacitors can be useful in some car audio systems, but their purpose is not to make the bass louder or to reduce the alternator's workload.

Answer 4

In my opinion caps don't do what they are made to be if you have about a 1000watt system. Then you would really need an HO alternator. I put one in miy truck to give it 25 extra amps and it made a huge difference. The alternator is like the heart of the system.

Answer 5

Capacitors are used to keep the sound modulation out of other parts of the amplifier. Essentially they short circuit frequencies not wanted elsewhere.

Answer 6

Great answer, Kaezoo.

Hook up the system without a capacitor. You may not even need any upgrades.

Answer 7

check out your local installer for the right answer it's free and you don't want to blow your investment