After Market Sat Nav

[rickit]

Has anybody hard wired there after market sat nav to their car ? I have decided that I no longer want the power cable from the cig lighter as it gets in the way and am thinking of wiring permanently to the back of the cig lighter.

[Damian]

Has anybody hard wired there after market sat nav to their car ? I have decided that I no longer want the power cable from the cig lighter as it gets in the way and am thinking of wiring permanently to the back of the cig lighter.

I did this when I had my Vectra. I didn't hard wire the sat nav directly but bought a multiport extension socket, hard wired this to the cig lighter then placed it behind the heater control panel.

I then had my sat nav and my mobile phone charger lead plugged into the multiport all nicely hidden away.

You usually can't hardwire your satnav as the 12v plug contains a fuse, if you do hardwire it by chopping the plug off up you could blow your satnav

Cheers

[fingers66]

You usually can't hardwire your satnav as the 12v plug contains a fuse, if you do hardwire it by chopping the plug off up you could blow your satnav

Cheers

Of course the sat navs can be hard wired, my 2 pals have it done, Im the odd 1 out by not having it done.

[KTM Chris]

Damian is right - you can't simply chop the cigarette lighter plug off the end and hard wire it in because the plug acts as a transformer to reduce the voltage. My Tomtom One for example needs an input of 3.7 volts, not the 12 ish that the car outputs. Best way is with the hidden hard wired cigarette lighter socket and the standard adaptor permanantly plugged in. I've done this on my motorbike, and I'm about to do it on the Vectra for the mobile phone charger.

[kabooboo]

I used to have a PDA based sat nav in the old car (Vec B). Hard-wired the cradle into a power source behind the glovebox. I really got used to no faffing about with trailing wires.

Bought one of those TomTom IQ route thingies and soon got annoyed with the trailing wires, more so because it also had the traffic receiver which causes another wire. The other thing I hated was having to plug the damn thing in all of the time.

Got round the problem by purchasing a Brodit active holder for the sat nav which is mounted on a bracket next to the computer display screen. Until I get a bit more sorted, I've run the power lead and traffic receiver leads in via the glovebox, concealed them and taken the ciggy lighter plug into the rear power socket.

Plug and play

[rickit]

Tried to do this today, no problems picking supply up from cig lighter and locating 3 way ciggy adapter behind glove box, but cannot find a run to get the power lead from the passenger side to drivers side. I reckon Im going to try and locate the adapter in the dash drivers side as long as I can get a route to the cig lighter, otherwise maybe pull head unit out to locate a run. Another try tomorrow.

[rickit]

Well spent a few hours on Sunday getting the job done, located the adapter under the dashboard on the drivers side and managed quite easily to get a run back to the cig lighter. From there its quite easy to get the cables exiting to the sat nav located on the drivers side. Only cables visible now are about two or three inches, looks so much better I think and well worth the hassle. Excuse the state of the windscreen but didn't get time to clean her this weekend.

[GSi-Col]

well done i hard wired my snooper radar device in my vec b cause was annoyed with the wire going everywhere

[vectrac20tsri]

just fitted mine toady to the air vent,but i got a garmin and when i turn the ignition on it starts up as if you have just plugged it in as its ignition live and when you turn the ignition off its as if you have pulled it out and the screen says do you want to turn off or no or it will power down auto after 30 seconds will get some pics up reallt easy to do