G1. Can I wire LED Lights to switch?

[littleboots]

So I have a stock g1. Well the engine is stock. I have a few LED LIGHTS drawing about 5amps. Can I tie into the key switch so these switch for the lights is only hot when the cart is switched to forward or reverse? The reason I ask is I don't want to depend on my kids to turn the light switch off because they will forget. So I want the switch to be connected to the key switch. Also what color wire am I tapping into. I read he wiring diagram but couldn't figure out how to have lights work in forward AND reverse. If forward is the only option I guess I'll just do that.

Should I put a relay in? I have an extra hot wire next to the switch directly from the battery.

Thanks every one. I'll post pics of my cart once I get this **** thing finished. I'm almost there

[littleboots]

Here's some teaser pic's of what we've got going on over here.

[Spicyunicorn]

someone will chime in if I'm wrong but when I wired my cd player up I used a toggle switch I could not find a "switched power wire" anywhere on my G1

[slonomo]

Yeah, your best bet is to go straight to the battery and have a lighted toggle switch. Mount all your switches on a panel in the same location so you can just look at it quick and see that they are all off. Cool cart!

[littleboots]

Perfect. That's what I'll do then. Didn't know if they drew a lot of power so I wasn't sure if I could tie into a forward switch (didn't even know if power run up to the switch but I'm assuming it does. Was trying to make it easier for my kids so I didn't have a dead battery every other day

[sho305]

I have not looked at the G1 wiring but how about the output from the pedal switch? I'd still run that to a relay, then run any lights on the relay, since relays are like $3 anyway. It may work fine but some day you add to it and it blows a fuse or something, with a relay you don't have to worry. Yamaha did not engineer any extra into the stock wiring. You should also be able to run a relay on both forward and reverse solenoids and have both activate the lights, or activate the power to the light switch.

[littleboots]

The issue running it to the pedal switch is that the lights would go off once you took your foot off the gas. I've got a relay so I'll put that in there.

[slonomo]

I suppose you could wire it into the forward reverse switch. You'll want to get your multimeter out and do some checking. Some of those circuits are wacky. If you wire it into forward, the lights would go off when in reverse....and vice versa. Not sure that's the way I'd do it though. I've always had mine on a rocker switch straight to the battery. At the time my kids were 5 and 2, never had a problem yet. With the kids, it all comes down to teaching them what NOT to touch.....LOL But I've been teaching my kids to drive for years and they are very good, and very responsible. Never let them drive the cart without supervision though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYS4FAYVvuI

This was back a few years. Boy was 5 then.

[sho305]

You could put a capacitor on the relay to keep it on for a set time, otherwise wire it off the key like Slo says. You could still wire a relay on each and both to the lights, what ever one worked would make the lights work.

[cgtech]

Originally Posted by sho305

You could put a capacitor on the relay to keep it on for a set time, otherwise wire it off the key like Slo says. You could still wire a relay on each and both to the lights, what ever one worked would make the lights work.

To do that you would also need an extra diode capable of supplying the light relay. Otherwise the capacitor would also feed the F&R coil, which would either drain the capacitor very fast, or allow the F and the R coil to be energized at the same time (probably not good at all). You could also do as i have drawn to get headlight relay to be active in both key positions.