I’ve been meaning to post this up for sometime now but didn’t know where. I have a meter that reads low resistance accurately to 0.01 ohm, I bought 8 brand new zd9 plugs, at a room temp of around 70-72F they all read 0.25 ohm, this will decrease some the cooler it gets outside.
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The current sense resistors (z resistor) is below what I can measure. Now excluding wire loss but including battery sag of say 10.8V, 0.25 ohm / 8 glow plugs gives 0.03125ohms, 10.8V/0.03125Ohms =345.6A but decays quickly as the plugs heat up.
I have a converted pc power supply that can do 60A at 12V, I can heat one plug to bright orange in 2 seconds. Interesting note that the 7.3 DI glowplugs draw half the current that the IDI does.
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I currently have a factory controller with 8 separate 14ga wires running to the glowplugs and the controller will still run them 15s in cold weather, these controllers are fairly forgiving on the wiring as my last setup was a single piece of 8ga with ~3” taps to the glowplugs and it still operated correctly. Now I’m sure if you were to wire up 4 cat batteries with 4/0 cable and ran that to the controller and 8-10ga to each plug, the controller may have a over current detection built in to shut down the system, though I have personally seen it burn off a pinched plug wire before and not even break a sweat so not sure how if it really does have over current detection.
If anyone wants more tests or things to check let me know and I’ll see what I can do. P.s don’t ask me to run all 8 plugs at once, I don’t have a 400A power supply........yet