Does anyone have any good dieas on keeping audio stuff cool in the summer heat? With a black car it gets mighty hot even when parked in the shade and if it has to be left in the sun then it is like an oven...

Last week when it was super hot I think we fried the main fuse as the system just totally cut out but came on half way to the audio shop the next day - they said it may have been the fuse and that if it happened again they would replace it - freaked me out though and may I say some very unpleasant things came out of my mouth when I was met with silence when starting the car...

I have been told to leave the ski hatch open to help circulate air when the car is parked rather than it being all caught in the boot but any other good ideas would be very helpful

I took out my 6x9's. 2 of my amps sit underneath the parcel shelf, the other amp is in the larger boot area and has a lot of room to breathe.

But an even better way to keep them cool is to keep the gains down. If your amps are ever overheating you are driving them too hard and you need a bigger amp which will stay cooler at higher output. Or you need to trim the gains a tad.

Peace

Tim

if it was a fuse it wouldnt of come back on either... probably your amps heating up and going into protection mode... lol @ audio shop thinkin it might of been a fuse, thats pretty amatuerish, but like tim said, turn the gains down a bit and maybe revise the outlay in you boot, iv got 2 amps in my boot one on each side (behind tail lights) ones a 1400w mono block running a 1ohm... it never gets hot cos theyve got plenty of room for them to breath and the gains are set quite modestly

edit- tim whats that thing in your sig represent? felatio? haha

i added a computer CPU fan inside my amp now it runs COLD and on super hot says its only very warm, and it only cost like $20 to do

But an even better way to keep them cool is to keep the gains down. If your amps are ever overheating you are driving them too hard and you need a bigger amp which will stay cooler at higher output. Or you need to trim the gains a tad.
Tim, just a hypothetical situation, say i've got my 12" subs running off my 4ch (bridged to 2 ch) and during hot weather it overheats. Ok so let's just say i turn down my gain by half of what it was on, if i then were to double the volume at the headunit (so that the same amount of power was going to the subs) would this still cause the amp to overheat in exactly the same way?

Also when you say breathing room, where does it need the most room, on the sides or on top of the amp?
For my boot install i'm thinking of flush mounting them into the false floor and having cpu fans connected up to help keep them cool, reckon this will be fine?

I dont know what im doing differantly.
I've never overheated an amp. I run the gain on my mono at about 9/10 and its never had heat issues. My 4 channel runs reasonable gain levels (pretty high) and has never cooked.
Its the second of this type of 4 channel i've owned, and i sold it to a mate, who can make is turn off from heat, and has been forced to use a fan on it to keep it going! we run almost exact same componants and the levels are very simular.
Its just odd that i never had it die and he has.

I dont know what im doing differantly.
I've never overheated an amp. I run the gain on my mono at about 9/10 and its never had heat issues. My 4 channel runs reasonable gain levels (pretty high) and has never cooked.
Its the second of this type of 4 channel i've owned, and i sold it to a mate, who can make is turn off from heat, and has been forced to use a fan on it to keep it going! we run almost exact same componants and the levels are very simular.
Its just odd that i never had it die and he has.

it could really be anything
your car might be giving the amp better air flow so the hot air doesnt sit in the one spot around the amp,
are you running the same sort of power cabling etc? wired up the same?

Computer fans are your friend. Easy to install and will cool down your amps considerably.

Science, it's probably the size of your car as well... little cars are much louder than big cars with the same power, so I'd say in reality your amps might not be working as hard even though it sounds louder.

That combined with current flow, box design (ported vs sealed), music genre could be anything.

i had the same-ish sort of problems once... it was something like 'dry connection' or something. basically alpine had to take back and fix the bloody thing under warranty.