Fuel Pump
Now it is time to wire the fuel pump to the POWERCELL in our 1967 Mustang project. This is the last major output that needs to be wired in. In our next series of posts, we will be talking about wiring the switches to the MASTERCELL.
There are lots of different kinds of electric fuel pumps for cars and trucks. Primarily, they fall into two categories: in-tank and in-line. These are pretty self-explanatory. In-tank fuel pumps are mounted in the fuel tank. In-line fuel pumps are installed somewhere in the fuel line running between the tank and the engine. Our customer is using an Aeromotive 325 Stealth In-Tank Pump for this project.
Just like everything else in your car, thoroughly read and understand the manual that came with your fuel pump before you start this part of the install. Remember that you are playing with Gasoline.
Wiring for the fuel pump is pretty simple. The fuel pump needs battery power and ground. The battery power is going to come from a POWERCELL output. The ground connection is going to be made locally to the chassis.
This Aeromotive pump has two wires: red and black. Black is ground and that is going to connect to the chassis. Remember how important good ground connections are. Make sure that you have a reliable metal-to-metal connection between your ground wire and the chassis.
The red wire is power. This is going to connect to a POWERCELL output. In most of our configurations, this power comes from output 10 on the rear POWERCELL. This is the tan wire on the A connector. The advantage of using our system to power the fuel pump is that the pump gets connected to the local POWERCELL. The fuse and relay for that pump are built into the POWERCELL. If you have a POWERCELL mounted in the rear of the car, the power wire going to the pump is very short.
We need to make a few comments about current draw. Take a good look at the manual or specifications for your fuel pump. You have 25-amps of steady-state current draw to work with on each POWERCELL output. Aeromotive publishes great graphs in their manuals that show current draw and fuel flow versus pressure. At the highest flow rate and highest pressure, this pump draws about 16-amps. This is well below the 25-amp capacity of a single POWERCELL output.
In some cases, you need to provide power to the fuel level sender in the tank. If yours needs to be powered, you can splice off the fuel pump output on the POWERCELL. It is a good time to wire sender power if needed while you’re wiring power to the pump.
That’s it for wiring the fuel pump output. We’ll talk about wiring the fuel pump trigger to the MASTERCELL in upcoming blog posts. Click on this link to contact us with questions or comments.