Former VWDieselParts.com Forum

Well that was fun. It's just under freezing temps here in Pittsburgh, my block heater has apparently died, and I noticed that the stock 50A fuse was blown for my glowplugs.

I thought I could get away with just bypassing the fuse for a quick start (I'm doing some other testing and figured that would be fine until I got a new fuse later this week) only to...wait for it...melt the wires headed to the glowplugs.

Doh! That was dumb...

Part of the problem is I think I had used only 10 gauge wires...that will be changing, but I'm also finally going to try to pimp my glowplugs using a distribution system.

Regardless...happy holidays to everyone! I hope this finds you warm and having fun!

#10AWG wire is good for 30A. If you replaced the factory wire with the #10 and they are all wired in series, then this was the wrong size wire (as you figured out). Running #10's from a distribution block to each glow plug would be fine, but you'd need to run larger wire to the distribution block to power all the glow plugs.

82vdub wrote:#10AWG wire is good for 30A. If you replaced the factory wire with the #10 and they are all wired in series, then this was the wrong size wire (as you figured out).

Thanks 82vdub. I got in there a little deeper and it looks like it was a #8AWG wire from the battery to the glow plugs. So the question is: why did the wire melt? Is it that the fuse provides just enough resistance to keep the amperage down? Or did I inadvertently upgrade my glowplugs when I ordered them from Jack?

Regardless, I'm going to wire two #8AWG wires in parallel to a ford solenoid, wire that to two distribution blocks, each through a 30A fuse (which will hopefully be enough), and then run #10AWG wires to the individual plugs. If that doesn't work, I'll look at upgrading to a 50A fuse per two plugs (but 30A is what I got now and nothing's open).

Thoughts?

Mystery solved: one of the glow plugs had shorted out. I fired up the glow plugs why watching the engine and one of them started to smoke.

Disconnected it and all is well....

Yea, the only time the fuse should blow is when there's some short somewhere, or under a weird circumstance.

yup. that lack of ring or gap is indicative of over-torque.

personally, i run a OO ga. cable from the battery to a Ford starter solenoid, then to a 4 fuse block with 4 separate 10ga wires. manual switch so i get as much glow as i can stand!

i've also stopped my GP burnout by switching from Duraterms to DieselRX plugs. i get along of nailing at times with Veg Oil and it seemed to take the Duraterms out within as short as 4 months. had the DieselRX plugs in for almost 2 years.

Thanks for the tips, volks!