I recently installed three 12V accessories on my 2001 TT Coupe using fuse taps. It was very easy and worked out great, so I figure I ought to tell people what I did.

I already uploaded some detail images to Amazon and put tons of rollover notes on them, so I figure I should mostly just link to them for the detailed stuff. So you know what this is about, here are some images of what things looked like when I was done:




In the image above, the thing on the dash is a typical Garmin GPS attached to a standard Garmin friction mount. The mount is great (it won't move a fraction of an inch) and almost might as well be glued down even though it's just setting there. This is about the best I could come up with for the power cable for now. Anything better will probably require dashboard disassembly and hole drilling or something. (I might eventually drill a hole in the defroster duct or something, run it through that, and seal it up around the cable or something. That way there wouldn't be any visible hole drilled anywhere if I need to remove the thing.)

The thing in the lower left is an Orange brand retrofit TPMS receiver. It was hard to decide where to put this because there's almost no place to put it and I was NOT going to set it on the dash or stick it on the window. I actually can't see it normally where it is now because my view of it is blocked by the steering wheel, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing anyway. The display is rather bright with no dimmer (some people find it blinding at night) and it'll sound an alarm anyway if the tire pressure gets out of the safe range. The only other place I could think to put it is the spot right over the headlight ****. I might mess with it later to see what looks best. (Right now the thing is attached with standard velcro strips which aren't sticking to the dash too tightly, so I'm betting I can remove it without tearing dash bits off with it.)





The image above shows the Wagan four socket cigar socket extender that I installed. It's stuck to the dash using a huge patch of Velcro Industrial Strength that covers the whole top of the thing. That thing isn't going anywhere by itself, and it's extremely difficult to separate the velcro strips even if you're trying. I don't think those velcro strips are ever coming unglued (without maybe a carefully applied heat gun, but I don't even know about that). It doesn't matter too much though because nobody will ever seen them as you can tell from the next photo.




Above you can see exactly where I stuck the thing. I pushed it as far back as possible before sticking it to the underside, and amazingly it's out of the way of both the ashtray door and even that little light that lights up the storage drawer! Amazing! I was thrilled. The wire from the thing leads off to the fuse box. (Links to that in a second.)

The only thing that bugs me is the LED which is always on 24h a day because the thing is wired to unswitched power. I'm not yet convinced that this drains enough power to worry about though (unless the car sits there a month or something maybe). If it turns out to be an issue I'll probably just rip the led out.




The above image is just to prove that I really can open the ash tray. With things actually plugged into the sockets I probably won't be able to, but who cares. If you aren't using any of the sockets then this whole area looks and operates as though it were stock. To see the thing you pretty much have to bend down and look under there. Otherwise it's totally out of view.

Needless to say, with four sockets under here (one of which will even warm up a cigarette lighter, though I never plan to do that) the crappy original cigar socket won't be getting used anymore especially since it barely holds connectors and an open ashtray door gets in the way of the storage compartment below.


Details

Ok, so the rest of the photos are on Amazon where they've got rollover notes identifying everything. Hopefully the rollovers will make up for the inconvenience of these not being inline in the thread.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...=setImg&page=0

The link above pretty much just identifies everything in the previous photos for those who aren't familiar with the car. So you can safely ignore that.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...=setImg&page=0

Here's the side view showing how the outlet extender is wired up, and how the GPS power adapter is hardwired. The rollovers explain everything in detail. Notice that I used some bullet connectors under there. If those LEDs or anything else turns out to be an issue if the car sits idle for a few days then I can just unplug one of those temporarily if I plan to let it sit. Anyway, in summary, the circuit goes

fuse box -> bullet connectors -> vampire taps -> outlet extender

vampire taps out -> garmin power adapter electrodes

So the Garmin might as well be plugged into the extender as far as power draw is concerned because it's on the same circuit.

Wrapping stripped wire around cigar connector electrodes is a bit unorthodox and I was worried that they might not make good contact, so I wrapped (tied) wire around both ground electrodes very tightly (up under and over each electrode clip, not just over) and taped over everything with electrical tape. Then I unscrewed the fuse cap on the connector, stuck the positive wire under the sprung tip electrode so it was making solid contact, screwed the tip back on, then wrapped the wire around the tip before taping the tip like crazy with electrical tape. Then I wrapped the whole thing up in more electrical tape.

There seemed to be no way to take the garmin adapter apart without damaging it or I would have attached the wires in a better manner, but doing things this way seems reasonable and I can remove everything and have a perfectly normal cable if needed. The cable is also kind of expensive because it includes the FM traffic receiver, so I really didn't want to be damaging that.

Arguably I should have taken a bare female cigar outlet, put the connector in that, then taped the whole thing up and used the wires coming from the female outlet, but I think my electrode wrapping job probably ended up being more secure than trying to tape the connector into its own socket or something. Anyway, the adapter still has it's fuse, and the circuit it's wired to has it's own fuse as well. So there's a little extra layer of safety there.

The vampire taps are tapped into the socket extender wire and also taped over individually then taped over together. Basically everything is taped up like crazy and the stuff on the outside is Gorilla tape (which will probably be a nightmare to remove if I ever need to.)

Everything is also zip tied down like crazy with several zip ties to make sure nothing gets under the pedals. That stuff isn't going anywhere on its own, and it seems to be safe from snagging on the driver.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...=setImg&page=0

That's the full view of the fuse box panel area. Notice that I managed to get ALL of the wires for all of these things into the gap between the dashboard panels. I didn't photograph it but the wires run across the gap to the steering colum, over the steering column (hidden in the gap you see when you tilt the wheel down) back to the gap to the right of the column, then down between the gap on the left side of the radio door (where the GPS cable is coming out), all the way down that vertical gap way back to where the floor vent is (which is where those blue bullet connectors are hanging in the previous photo).

Totally invisible, very easy to stuff those wires in there, and they can be pulled out without too much trouble as I had to do a couple of times rearranging stuff.

You can see the ground wires going off to a chassis grounded bolt. Not all of those bolts are grounded, just the one next to the fuse puller and the one with the yellow paint. Normally you could wire the ground to something random under the dash, but it seems like everything under there is covered over so completely that it's practically impossible to get to a grounded bolt without taking apart the dash (which is what I was trying to avoid).


http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...=setImg&page=0

This is the close up of the fuse box. There are two fuse taps which are the good kind that both have a passthrough for the existing fuse in whatever fuse slot you're tapping, and a socket for another fuse for your new circuit. I made a point NOT to use those crappy taps that just jam into the slot next to the fuse blade. Those are bad. If you use fuse taps, get ones like these that give the new circuit its own fuse and won't bend up the clips in the blade slots.

One fuse tap is for switched power. It's tapping the blower socket and currently only goes to the TPMS (which reportedly will drain the battery in about 2-3 days if left powered all the time, which is pointless to do anyway). The TPMS shouldn't use more than 2A and it has its own 2.5A fuse. To wire it in I cut off the cigar connector, along with the fuse in the connector, because the TPMS just takes a full 12V+ of power and doesn't need an adapter in the cable to convert the voltage to 5V or whatever like the GPS does.

The other tap is for unswitched power that goes to the outlet extender and GPS. It's tapping the cigar lighter circuit slot, appropriately enough, though it is NOT inline in that circuit, it's just wired into the unswitched power there at that fuse blade. The original cigar lighter thus still has it's very own 15A circuit, and the new unswitched power circuit has a 10A fuse. This is because the fuse tap is only rated for 10A, and the socket extender is only rated for 10A as well. (The connector I cut off the extender cable also had a 10A fuse, so this replaces that fuse.)

You might notice that I used crimp on bullet connectors in places where you might ordinarily just use butt connectors. I didn't have any butt connectors and using a reasonable number of bullet connectors should just make life easier if anything needs rearranging anyway.

The only problem with the new 10A circuit is that I have an AC power inverter (just a cigar connector right now, not hardwired) that's 150W meaning that it can possibly draw 12.5A or something. So if I hardwire that I'll need to give it it's own 15A circuit and fuse to avoid blowing the tap's fuse. Laptop power supplies are only 60W or something so I could probably use the thing on the 10A circuit most of the time anyway, and I practically never use the AC inverter, but if I use it I'll probably plug it into the original cigar lighter socket (it's own 15A circuit and fuse) just to avoid the risk of fuse blowing.

All the fuse taps I've found seem to be limited to 10A, so hardwiring the inverter would probably necessitate removing dash panels. I'm not in a hurry to do this because I haven't used the inverter in like 2-3 years anyway.


On a somewhat unrelated note:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...=setImg&page=0

That's a Garmin ecoNav HD connected to the diagnostic port and stuck to the underside of the dash with industrial velcro. Luckily it can power itself from the diagnostic port so no special work was required to connect it. I just wish there were something under there to zip tie the thing to, but the industrial velcro is ridiculously strong so it probably doesn't matter.


Also, Amazon is not making it easy for me to permalink to those photos because of their javascript/ajax stuff (pretty stupid not to give me a way to permalink because it draws people to their site) so here's a link to all of my photos on amazon in case you have any trouble with the above direct links:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-me...newSort&page=0


The next project(s) is/are going to be an ipod/bluetooth/aux adapter for the head unit, an iPhone 4 dock/holder of some sort, hardwiring a radar detector, and probably hardwiring the inverter to something if I end up removing the dash to do something else.


Let me know what you think....

 

Thanks for posting this, very informative.

cheers.

 

No problem. Oh yea, and to give some proper credit here I got the idea from this:

http://mk1tt.montebellopark.com/easyvalentine.html

Though those instructions have you using the evil cheap crappy blade-style fuse taps that just jam in the slot along with the fuse and don't give you another fuse for the new circuit.

So I strongly recommend against the "just jam something else in along with the fuse McGuyver style" fuse taps, and strongly recommend another fuse for the new circuit. I know of at least one friend-of-a-friend story of someone's car burning completely to the ground because of an electrical fire after they added a bunch of accessories. What do you want to bet that it had something to do with a fuseless circuit?

 

I've used several of Jeff's DIYs, but TBH, his recommendation for the blade fuse tap is not 'stand' alone. An inline fuse on the "hot" wire is always recommended.

 

Sorry, I wasn't trying to imply that he specifically wasn't recommending a fuse just because the fuse tap design didn't include one. I kind of mixed the two issues together in an unclear manner because it reminded me that this type of fuse tap doesn't force you to install a fuse in the new circuit, and I forgot to stress the importance of that in the original post. (I think most people who are smart enough to have a TT would use a fuse regardless, but an extra warning can't hurt I suppose.)

The main problems with the "bare" "jam in slot next to fuse blade" type tap, in my opinion anyway, are that they can bend the little terminals in the fusebox, and they aren't insulated so there's just more of a chance that something could contact the uninsulated live metal and cause a short or something. But there's no reason why someone who knew what they were doing couldn't safely use the simple blade tap, it's just that they're not as "idiot proof" for those who don't know much about this stuff. (The auto parts store I went to didn't even sell them.)

Anyway, I just wanted to stress the point that it was really important to have a fuse in all of these circuits no matter how you wire the fuse in.

 

Exactly...ALWAYS use an inline fuse.

 

Thanks for the post. The first 4 pictures don't work for me. Could you repost them?

 

Sorry about that. I originally uploaded the photos as attachments and somehow they got deleted at some point after I hit preview a couple of times. If someone can give me a way to go back and edit the message I'll fix the original post.

Here's a photo album with the missing photos:

https://www.audiworld.com/forums/alb...albumid=165535

The caption in each photo is the same text from the original message explaining that photo. I'd repost here but it's probably less messy just to refer people to the album and captions.