Bought the wife a 2005 GMC yukon XL - 2 questions

[robphelan]

Her Explorer came down with a case of the spun rod bearing.

So, we bought her a loaded 2005 yukon XL - leather, heated seats (hey, it can get chilly in south texas), DVD w/wireless audio (RSE), quad captain's chairs...

questions:
1) we're going on a 10 hour road trip and I want to run the modded xbox to the DVD system via aux input so we don't have to keep switching DVDs around for the kids.. what type of inverter should I buy? And, should I hardwire it to the battery? Is that difficult to do?

2) are there any aftermarket wireless headphones I can buy? It only came with one.

thanks alot.

[soccerballtux]

just beat them if they scratch the dvds, problem solved

[soccerballtux]

just kidding.

Look up the power requirements of the Xbox and buy an inverter that can do 20% more than that. Any inverter should come with a cigarette lighter adapter. Be aware, however, that turning the key to the "off" position may turn off the power to that cigarette lighter. Many vehicles have lighters you can plug in to for power that don't shut off when the key is removed. Try it in all the sockets to check for one of these. Short of that, yes, you can wire it straight to the battery, but run some quick math on about how long you can run it like this for-- eg lets say the xbox uses 80 watts, the inverter is 80% efficient, and your typical car battery stores about 30-50 amp-hours worth of juice. So, at 80 watts, factoring in the inverter inefficiency, the draw from your battery is 100 watts, at 12.5v this is about 8 amps, so you could run it for a couple hours before you might have trouble starting the engine.

Since you aren't hardcore gaming, the power requirement might be much lower, maybe only 50 watts, at which point you can leave the kids in the car buckled into their child-seats watching movies while you and wife go have fun. Just make sure your tinting is dark enough that people can't see in and call the cops on you for locking the kids in. This doesn't look the best on ones background check, but I'm sure it can be dealt with if you tried hard enough.

[3chordcharlie]

Originally Posted by soccerballtux

just kidding.

Look up the power requirements of the Xbox and buy an inverter that can do 20% more than that. Any inverter should come with a cigarette lighter adapter. Be aware, however, that turning the key to the "off" position may turn off the power to that cigarette lighter. Many vehicles have lighters you can plug in to for power that don't shut off when the key is removed. Try it in all the sockets to check for one of these. Short of that, yes, you can wire it straight to the battery, but run some quick math on about how long you can run it like this for-- eg lets say the xbox uses 80 watts, the inverter is 80% efficient, and your typical car battery stores about 30-50 amp-hours worth of juice. So, at 80 watts, factoring in the inverter inefficiency, the draw from your battery is 100 watts, at 12.5v this is about 8 amps, so you could run it for a couple hours before you might have trouble starting the engine.
.

Make sure the 12V outlet is able to give enough amps. A lot of them are 10A fused, and this might be pushing it for an xbox on an inverter.

Unless you are well under the limit for the power circuit, running your own power cable is safer since you can size the wire, and fuse, to your application. Definitely would be concerned about draining the battery though; if I were planning to use something like this, I would take one of those portable booster packs to make sure I could get started again after killing the battery.

[nboy22]

I would definitely wire the inverter directly to the battery/chassis of the car. I think you would be overloading the little wire that runs to your cigarette lighter if you get one that can plug into the cigarette lighter. Plus I'm pretty sure the xbox uses quite a bit of power, because that power brick it comes with is pretty massive.

[fbrdphreak]

Xbox (original or 360) draws a lot of power. I would definitely run your own own fused wire to the battery and ground the inverter to the chassis.

[videogames101]

I've run an xbox 360 playing rock band off a cigarette inverter, np np. Until we hit a bump ~10 hours in and the disc got railed, nice circle round the whole thing =(