Ok... so I recently installed the some heated seat pads in my girlfriends car and they are working great. But I just wired them straight to the battery so I'm worried that if she forgets to turn them off one night it could at worse cause a fire or, at best, simply drain the battery. So far things have been good and she has remembered to always shut it off, but I'm thinking I'm going to try and wiring up the power to be tied to the ignition.

So here's my question. I know most of you probably have no idea on the internal wiring of a Kia Rio. Haha... so the question is how would you wire the simplest circuit to a the ignition. Lets say you have a light (or I guess any load would do. And it's just tied to the battery.

I'm assuming you'd cut the (+) wire and simply run it into a the ignition somehow, but in our trucks where is that? Is there a good place to do this? I'm hoping with some stooping and some ingenuity, I can figure it out in the Kia. Let me know if that makes sense. Or if anyone has any good diagrams for our trucks.

 

The on with run at the radio is where I would tap it. Depending on how much load they draw I might run a relay as well.

 

x2 or plug in into a fuse that only runs when the key is turned on. My '88 had a fuse slot for power seats which i didn't have so I tied my cb into that slot with its own inline fuse

 

Heated anything is going to draw a lot of current. Do not just hook it up to the radio or some random slot in the fuse panel. Some specs are needed here. Does it say on any of the instructions how many amps this setup draws?

 

He could run from the radio as his control circuit though. Then run a power wire directly from the battery to the relay to juice those things

 

The heated seats have a 10 amp fuse that came with them. Right now those are in line on the (+) post. I don't think it draws anything near that, but I'd need to research a bit more to make sure. I thought I remember reading some where around 3 amps per seat, but if it's got a 10 amp fuse, I suppose you have to assume that it can draw 10 amps.

I was wondering that. Is the fuse block tied to the ignition? I suppose it would have to be at least some of them would have to be. Suppose I could stop asking stupid question about that just get out the ol' Multimeter and figure it out.

 

It can draw up to 10 amps since that is what it is fused it. So whatever you attach it too needs to be able to handle the full load of the heaters AND the full load of whatever you hooked it up to (stereo, etc). 10 amps (maybe more since there is more than one heater) is way too much to be adding to the existing radio circuit.

The best way to do this is leave it connected to the battery and use a relay to switch the power on and off. Drive the relay off an actual ignition switched source, not one that comes on in accessory. There are numerous in the fuse panel you can tap into for this.