Electrical Upgrade HO Alternator
 

For those of you who have installed an HO alternator in your pre 99 XJ how did you upgrade the ground wire? The positive is pretty straight forward alt to battery with upgraded fusible link or breaker installed. However the ground lead passes through a molded plastic mount that has two other wires in it. I am thinking about just leaving the factory wiring in place and adding an extra ground wire from the alternator to the block and then one new wire from block to battery.

Alternator will be 180 amps

My plan

Negative: 2awg wire from alt to block in addition to stock 6awg, and 2awg from block to battery.

Positive: 2awg wire from alt to 180 amp breaker 2awg from breaker to battery.

Did anyone else do it this way?

The small wires off the back are for the regulator, but grounding like you are talking about could never hurt. I have found that you can never have too good of a ground. I am probably going to end up doing something similar with mine, and will run the better grounds also.

Mine has three 1/0 gauge wire for positive and and 3 for the ground also. I have a 320 amp alt

320 amp? Must be beefy. Got a link to it? Lol

Like a pic?

yeah or s website if there's one

off a single serpentine belt???

Yep. It won't let me upload a pic for some reason. Keeps saying upload fail over and over

That's going to take some HP to turn that at full tilt, would like to see it all wired up and mounted also.

gotta see how ya did it. most big alts over 200 amps get a second v-belt and custom pulley work done to the crank and other pulleys. surprised a serpentine has the surface area to keep up with the torque needed to turn the alt without smoking the belt.

also curious what you're running onboard that has power demands like that.

Thanks guys,
I figured it would work and knew that the two green wireswere for the regulator. However I was curious what others had done with this wire. I could snip ground wire on both sides of the molded mount but figured that was pointless because it would open the snipped wire to additional corrosion and there was no real reason not to just keep it.
Thanks again

Not sure about all that.


Nothing right now I had a audio system in there

i had a 250 or 275 amp in my old accord for the stereo. no special belt or anything. some have a different size pulley to spin faster but nothing crazy. depending on the casing you would/could modify the bracket or casting on the ALT to fit. mine was a powermaster never had issues in the 3-4 years i had it installed.

Once I relocate my battery I'm going to add 2 more alts