car radio to house electrical supply

CURVEBALLZSHOT

Hi,

Can anybody please tell me if there is a way of connecting a car radio cd mp3 player to an electrical supply from your home house.

i.e. what cables connectors I would need

Thanks

PauloMN

Car radios require an approx. 12 volt DC supply, and your house electricity is around 230 volts AC so you need a 12 volt transformer/power supply. Make sure that whatever supply you get is regulated and has a suitable current rating. At a guess I'd imagine that you need something capable of driving at least 12 volts at 1 amp (or 1000mA as you'll see more commonly on the specs).

Something like this should do the trick:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=96963&doy=14m11#overview

Or this:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=231&&source=14&doy=14m11

CURVEBALLZSHOT

Hi there,

Thanks for the info which is helpful....Hopefully you dont think I need to be spoon fed step by step in how this works, but is it an easy thing to connect the car radio to this unit.

It is a recent sony model with the usual connection leads.

I would also need to connect to some speakers, would you have any know how on this?

Thanks in advance

PauloMN

To connect it up to the power supply, you'd need to find the +12V and -12V wires from the stereo and wire those up to the terminals on the power supply. Usually the red wire is positive and the black wire is negative - that was the case when I last wired up a car stereo (about 10 years ago in fairness)!! There might also be another positive wire that you need to connect up to the power supply to power the radio's memory, to keep the station presets etc. alive, and of course you'd need to keep the power supply always switched on to do this. That wire could be any colour - you'd need to check the manual for the wiring diagram.

PLEASE double check everything when wiring up to the power supply, if you get it wrong it could be bye bye radio. You really do need to check the wiring diagram to verify the above.

As regards speakers, again the wiring diagram will tell you which wires are for which speakers.

Don't forget you'll need some sort of antenna if you wish to use the tuner. A small length of wire will probably do for local FM stations, or if you have NTL, you could use the FM feed from your cable point to hook into the radio.

stylers

you'll need a beefy enough power supply - 5 amps or thereabouts and more if you intend to use it at full tilt. An old 14V laptop power supply might do the trick - should have a few amps available.