i am drawing up a plan for multiple lights. what i am wanting to do is have ground fx, two 12", two 6", and two 3" neons, LED washer fluid dispensers, and LED licsence plate bolts hooked into one switch. what i am having trouble with is find a small switch that can handle all of that. where can i look other than radio shack, i looked and they are a bunch of idiots, that have switches and actually know what they are talking about.

You want a relay. It's basically an electric switch. Your small, nice looking switch does nothing but energize the relay coil. The coil is an electromagnet that slams two much beefier contacts together. It's all inside of a little plastic box about 1" cubed, with 4-5 pins coming out.

Two of the pins are for the coil, the other 2-3 are for the contacts.

Also, wiper nozzles and license plate stuff is illegal. Just food for thought. Any visible tubes (inside or outside the car) can be ticketed.

i have had the plate bolts on my old car nothing happened. eh oh well maybe put those on another switch then.

where can i get a relay that can accomadate the use i have in plan? i think i am going to need more than three plugs.

Washer fluid lights are like 4 years ago. As are the glowing license plates. But hey if you like it cool.

You can get an assload of different relays from radioshack. I think you can get some at autozone/pepboys/etc also.

One relay will have enough power to run everything you're trying to run. If you want to control them independently ... odds are you won't need a relay. The switches will be strong enough to run one or two lights.

so if the relay had the two pins for the relay and then only one other pin i could run multiple things off of that one pin? that is if i could connect them all.

Put them all in parallel. All the +'s of the neons get hooked together, and into the + of the battery (through a fuse). All the -'s get hooked together, and into the 'IN' on the relay. The 'OUT' on the relay gets hooked into the - of the battery. Pretty simple, there are diagrams all over google.

how would that be hooked to a switch. i just want to be able to turn the lights on or off if i want.

12VDC/10A DPDT Plug-in Relay


would this work? it says that its for high current stuff though so i don't know. its at the radio shack website.

As long as your lights combined don't go above 10 amps, you'll be fine.

cool. what if they do, does it just blow or do all of the lights blow?

You start a fire in the relay.

oh.

well can you hook two up. either that or use two and use two different switches for each one.