I decided to hardwire my detector so it can be the most powerful and I think I can set it to turn on with my ignition. So I have a question.

1. Can I wire it to the + green wire of the cigarette lighter?
2. Can I ground it to any screw that is touching body metal? If not, where would be the right spot?

Thanks. (dtn) cool.gif

 

I have a question too, yesterday i tried to hard wire my radar detector. I got the positive and negative striped and i decided to mak sure it worked, so i touched the to their appropriate places on the dome light terminals.

The result was a smokey radar, it was epic fail. MY question is what made me accidently roast my radar. BTW it was just a cobra radar, wasent that good.

 

HKC, yes and yes. I have so many accessories coming off my power outlet (cigarette lighter) that it's absurd. It works for a great switched power. The ground you can either hook to the negative on the power outlet (right next to where you got the power) or find a screw on the chassis. If you do find one like that, be sure there's no paint or anything insulating it. I just put a couple ground wires on the rear mount of the center console, of course that's a little far away for your purposes, but it's an example.

^^^ Not sure why you got a smokey detector, perhaps you needed some sort of resistor or converter. Since HKC's says that he can hook up to any 12V source, this will work fine for it. It could have been that you had the polarity backwards. The dome light is kinda tricky to find which is positive and which is negative...

 

Jorge, you hooked yours up to the dome light terminals? it seems like an easy solution. i'm not sure why that happened but like StrikeEagle said it probably reversed the polarity and that's why it fried. also how did you wire it up? it's best to buy a kit off ebay so you get the fuse to prevent frying the unit.

thanks Strike. i'm imagining you as gargamel, your castle is the center console,
and your LED's little smurfs running all about lmao.gif

OK it's connected to the blue wire and working great. the reason was i was trying to find out which wire to tap so that it's constant power. Thanks both.

 

I.
Am.
Gargamel!!
Bow to me!

 

I saw that strike eagle posted a great response before, so I didn't bother posting, but I realized that it might be beneficial to do it the way I did it. My radar detector is high up on my window right next to the rear view mirror. noone realizes it's there. It helps even more now that I have a tint strip. You can hook up power to the sunroof power line which is located up there in the console. I'm running a Cobra radar detector, and a garmin I3 GPS from that power source. It works great with no issues.