I have a simple kenwood stereo and it worked fine yesterday now it wont power on does anyone know trouble shooting for this? I checked the red wire at the wiring harness and it had 12.64 volts when the key was in the aux position but the yellow power wire had only 2.00 volts and as I held the voltmeter on the yellow wire the voltage slowly dropped untill it was at 0.01 and 0.00v. I checked all the fuses and the battery is fairly new and has a constant 12v. Please Help! THank you

 

Yellow wire just supplies constant power for the clock and memory.

You could hot wire red and yellow directly to the battery. If the unit still won't come on, and your ground is also good, time for a new unit.

 

Ok I did the hot wire and the head unit worked but there still is little power going to the yellow wire before the wiring harness and the red still has 12v when the ignition is on

 

You checked both fuses in the fuse panel and probed for ~12 volts at both cavities?

 

A very low voltage reading can be due to corrosion somewhere upstream. Follow the wire, checking voltage at various points.

 

Change the location of the yellow wire to another terminal that shows constant power when the ignition switch is turned off.

 

Can you elaborate on what you mean by changing the location?

 

Find another power source that has constant power when the key is off.

 

Run the yellow with inline fuse straight to the battery with 14g or better

 

The yellow wire has to have 12 volts for the head unit to operate but it requires very little current and almost any reasonable gauge wire should do. I would just find a terminal on the fuse panel with constant power or get one of the add-a-circuit kits which make the whole process extremely easy.

I think Walmart has the add-a-circuit units in the auto electrical section (not sure). I keep a couple of those around and just got one from Amazon for ~$5.

You did check both of the radio fuses on the fuse panel as well as confirm that voltage was present?

 

Thanks for all the help i just got it working!

 

Can you tell us briefly what you did? Might help someone else.