Wiring Actuators – How many is too many?

When wiring actuators to our HDC controllers and relays, we strongly recommend following the wire diagrams provided or downloading them from our website. Many of our diagrams will show you how many actuators can be installed and whether you will need any additional extension harnesses (i.e. slave relay) to support the setup.

Recommendations:

• Above, follow SAE standards when wiring up your vehicle.
• Most of our controllers, excluding our HDC hardwired keypad, can support 6 actuators (max) per channel. Adding more than the recommended 6 will cause degradation performance and reduces the lifecycle of the actuators. Additionally, you must take into account the length of wire when installing. There is a power loss of .2% per foot after 50ft of wire run. If using various sizes of wire, the power loss will vary. Therefore, if you have a run that requires longer than a 50-feet, we recommend doing thorough testing to make sure you will get the best performance from your actuators.
• We recommend using 14 AWG for the primary (trunk) wire and 16-18 AWG for the secondary (branch) wire.
• If you decide to add more than 6 to one channel we strongly recommend using a slave relay, such as, the PL910, which can provide more power to support power locking.