RETed

No, if you're connecting to a single wire temp sensor, use the white wire and ignore the twin wire plug.

The pic is confusing since it shows a double wire sensor, but your single wire sensor grounds through the sensor body.


-Ted

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

The AutoMeter sensor should work fine according to their instructions. You would just connect the WHITE wire into the wire leading from the sensor to the gauge.

Much, much better. It's made a huge difference on my car regarding temperature stability. With a relay, you either need to basically run the fan close to thermostat temp so it runs almost all the time, or set it higher so that in traffic the temps constantly increase and decrease as the fan cycles. With the PWM controller the fan will idle all the time and keep the car at thermostat temperature without drawing unnecessarily on the electrical system or restricting airflow at high speed. My oil and intake temps have improved as well as air is now being constantly drawn through the front of the car, and it has helped greatly with engine bay heat in general.

You'll need to read the "Single fan, OEM sensor, w/o AC" section.

In my experience, due to the sensitivity of the unit to ground voltage offsets, this wire should be cut from the Weatherpack and properly grounded to the chassis as close to the box as possible. Keep this wire short and you won't have issues.

Good news though: I spoke to a Spal engineer and shared my concerns regarding the circuit. He agreed and mentioned that indeed they have already changed this for the next version! There is now a separate signal ground and power ground. This should go a long way to eliminating ground issues.

NO! This wire does not go to ground! The two fan wires (black and red) must be connected to the FAN and nothing else. The red wire supplies 12V to the fan basically from the battery. The black wire is the wire the PWM unit actually switches to PWM the fan. Grounding it will cause bad things to happen.

The unit will come with a one wire harness for the temp sensor, and a two wire harness. You will use the one wire harness with the white wire and connect it to your sender. None of the other wires will be used.

The diagram you are showing doesn't match up to the instructions that I have. In both the printed manual and PDF that Spal provided me, the white wire is the OEM sensor wire and should never be grounded when using an OEM sensor.

My hookup is as follows:

Black on 3 conductor Weatherpack: Cut. Now grounded to chassis directly from unit.
Red on 3 conductor Weatherpack: 12V constant fused (30A).
Orange on 3 conductor Weatherpack: IGN 12V

White on temp harness: ECU side of OEM ECT (purple wire on my Microtech, not sure what colour on stock harness)

Red and black fan wires: to + and - on fan.

The 3 conductor triangle plug temperature harness comes in two variations in my version of the product. Two harnesses are included: one for OEM sensors and one for Spal sensors. The Spal sensor appears to be GM style ECT. I don't use this. So you will use one harness and file the other away for safe keeping in case you change later.

This setup requires a single speed fan. I'm using the Pontiac 6000/big GM fan that I always recommend. It's a single fan with a shroud that perfectly fits the 2nd gen rad. You can use a dual fan if you want. In that case you would use the dual fan wiring diagram to PWM one side of the fan, and control the other side with a relay which will be activated only when the unit is on high.

I'm always a fan of the GM fan, so to speak. http://www.aaroncake.net/rx-7/efaninstall.htm shows some pictures. It's never caused me issues, I've never overheated and they have been highly reliable. The fan has been on my car since 2001 (granted, it spent a lot of time in the garage ). It will pull BIG current though so if you control it only with a relay, you need a 40A unit.

arghx

iTrader: (3)

I'll probably run a setup very similar to yours. I am going to get a 120v wire-feed welder (probably a Miller 140 or something similar) pretty soon so I can start practicing welding, and making e-fan brackets will be one of my first projects.

arghx

iTrader: (3)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Parts...3286.m20.l1116

is this the correct cooling fan? It looks like it. I am going to do the e-fan conversion in the next couple months with the PWM controller. And can a reman s4 turbo alternator (parts store) handle the current draw?

EDIT: the first one appears to be for a 4 cylinder. http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1990-...3286.m20.l1116

is for the 6.

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

Either one of those fans is fine. As far as I know the 4 cylinder and 6 cylinder versions are basically the same besides a few mounting differences.

Another few words of wisdom regarding the SPAL FAN-PWM:

1. Use their temperature sensor. It will be a hell of a lot easier to get consistent operation. Because the grounding scheme of the controller is poor, it's easy to get a voltage offset when tying into your existing sensor. The result is that it's very hard to get the fan to operate at the speed you set at the temperature you want.

2. Set your fan speed aggressively. You can start your low point about 10 degrees below thermostat temp, but don't set your high point much over 90 degrees. Otherwise the car will tend to heat up and then "stick" at that hotter temperature. The fan will never run fast enough to bring it down again unless the car reaches the "high" temperature.

3. Mount the unit somewhere easy to access, because you will spend some time getting it set right. It's a pain in the ***.

4. Use the high output to run a secondary fan for your FMIC or oil cooler. If your water temps are in the "high" range, then your oil temps are much higher.

Honestly I'm about 50/50 between loving the controller and chucking it in the garbage. It's very poorly designed. The circuit is riddled with mistakes any 1st year EE wouldn't make. It has no gain control, meaning that the fan speed is linear to temperature. As you can imagine, this means that it is easy to make the car "stick" at a certain temperature as it forms a closed loop control with the fan. If there was a "gain", then the fan would overshoot it's set speed a bit until the car began to cool down, then it would go back to it's set speed based on that temperature.

Also for some odd reason, my unit just seems to suddenly let the car get hotter then normal and then start cooling it down. No idea why.

RETed

I'd like to also add a couple notes...

You really need an upgrade alternator (i.e. FD) for this.
Even a moderate fan can pull 10A easily.
The stock FC alternator cannot keep the voltage above 12.0VDC at idle with this current draw.

I've got the Spal twin 11" fans sitting in my room.
This would look like the "ideal" set-up for this controller, but I always want more.
I'm looking to get a pair 'o Flex-A-Lite "pancake" units which draw less current and claim more CFM (3,000CFM *each*) and do a custom install.
I prefer redundancy with the dual fans, since I've had singles die on me before.

I've never had the problems that Aaron Cake mentions above.
I watch my water temps like a hawk, especially in stop-n-go traffic in the middle of the day.
I've never had my water temps spike dangerously.
I guess I've been lucky to have it set nicely?
I've got mines set for 195F low and 205F high.
The temps never get above 210F, and it will peak max of 215F which I used to head up to a friends house on a BIG hill driving mostly in 2nd gear.
I have a generic 16" single in there now.


-Ted

arghx

iTrader: (3)

hmm, this thing is less sophisticated than I thought... in concept it is awesome but it sounds like poor execution. I figured it was like a closed-loop electronic boost controller for your cooling fan. I think I may just switch it off the Power FC then: Less **** in the engine bay, less wiring, easily adjustable without popping the hood, and 90 more bones in my pocket.

Actually, maybe I will just can the e-fan idea for a while. I don't have the money for an upgraded alternator (who does have money these days?). I've got other stuff I need to do and the costs just seem to keep escalating.

classicauto

iTrader: (3)

Just tossing this out there because there's some good discussion here, although its not SPAL PWM specific.

Using a solid state relay driven by a PWM channel off a standalone, could you achieve the same temp stability? Or is there something I'm missing?

arghx

iTrader: (3)

yeah I thought Haltechs have extra PWM channels besides the boost controller output

classicauto

iTrader: (3)

Yes, my old E6X had 4 in total, the new TECgt I'm using has 9. Just considering an alternate fan control method, I'm currently running it at thermostat temp with the fan on most of the time. Works, but I'm all for experimentation.

RETed

Oops, they were not F-A-L units...
They are Perma-Cool units.
12"
3000CFM
8.0A

A pair of those will outflow my Spal twins rated at just about 3,000CFM for a pair of 11" high flow fans.


-Ted

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

Absolutely. Don't even think of running any stock FC alternator with an e-fan. I've measured the current draw of my P6K fan on high, and it's 20A continuously. The Black Magic is worse.

As I recall, you are using a gauge sender as your temp input? Maybe the circuit is less sensitive when reading a one-sided input. I'm trying to decide to leave it as it is, or convert to their own temp sensor (basically a GM style unit). Converting means running more wire...not fun.

I tend to not want to watch my water temps like a hawk. Part of the reason I've tried to make this cooling system as automatic as stock. The only issue is that with the relay driven by the Microtech, it was just on/off. So temps would rise until the fan came on, then fall back down. Very annoying.

I think if you use their temp sender, you will get more consistent results. Using their sender eliminates the grounding problem. Still, the unit should not have grounding problems to begin with and there should be a gain setting. However fundamentally it does work.

What you might want to do, and what I have been thinking about lately, is to run two fans. A small one on a temp switch just above thermostat temp, and then a larger fan switched by the ECU at the "high" temp. That way the small fan works in most cases and shuts off on the highway. But if the temps increase, the big fan kicks in.

Not with a solid state relay. They aren't designed for PWM use. What you would want to do is connect the Haltech output to the gate of a high current MOSFET, using an opto-isolator to keep the two circuits separate. The MOSFET will need a big flyback diode. Then you could use the Haltech to PWM the fan.

arghx

iTrader: (3)

ok I bought the Pontiac 6000 fan (I bought the 4 cylinder one b/c it was cheaper and you said you don't think they're really any different) and I've been looking at it and looking at your pic for mounting. I have a Fluidyne radiator and it looks pretty similar to what you have in that pic.

Did your fan have four little mounting hole things on the 4 corners? Did you cut those off? And then you fabbed up those angled brackets and drilled holes into the side of the plastic shroud? And then you secured it with nuts, lockwasher, and bolt into the shroud itself, then nuts and bolts through the mounting points for the stock shroud. Am I understanding this right? I just don't want any mounting bolts to interfere with the operation of the fan and I want it to be secure.

Also, are you running a 40 amp relay? I was going to wire my (40 amp) relay like this:

85 - switched ground from power FC, 18 gauge
86 - constant +12V, 18 gauge (I guess I could run ignition switched but I guess it doesn't matter if the car needs to be on for the Power FC to switch the ground)
87 - constant +12V from battery , 10 gauge
87 - 10 gauge to positive wire on fan.

Also, do I need to reverse the polarity on the fan or anything like that? red wire is power and black is ground right?

Aaron Cake

iTrader: (1)

Yes. Basically I cut the stock mounting tabs off of the fan, smoothed down the plastic a little to make it look un-asstacular and then drilled holes in the shroud. I welded up some angle brackets but there's no reason you can't get them from the hardware store. M6 bolts and nuts secure them to the fan, and I think M6 as well fit in the stock shroud mounting tabs.

Pin 30 and 87 of the relay are the contacts, not 87 and 87 (87A is a NC contact, 87 is a NO contact).

The fan should run the correct direction if you connect the wires according to their colour. I always test first with a little 12V battery just to make sure because sometimes the wire colours are odd in OEM applications. Running it backwards won't damage it but of course it will blow in the wrong direction.

arghx

iTrader: (3)

yes I will use a bench grinder to keep the plastic from looking like crap.

and yeah I meant the 87 and 30 pins, that's a typo. 4 pin relays don't even have 87A.