So I put the xbox in the car and got a power inverter. I want to be able to have a switch for the inverter to be turned on and off.

Would it be safe to power it from the ignition wires? I dont want to run a wire from the batt.

OR

Should I just power it from the cigg lighter in the back?

What did you guys use to power your inverters?

 

12V Accessory Outlet (Cigarette Lighter).

 

depending on how electrically inclined you are... you can run your +12V line from the battery and then open up the inverter and run a signal wire from some sort of accessory power to the switch that usually turns the unit on manually. not too too hard.

 

i would suggest hardwiring it and running the power straight to the battery. the fuse on my cigarette lighter is only 15 amps. that means it can only handle 180 watts max. the xbox says it requires 2.1 amps with 110v AC. 110 x 2.1 = 231 watts. i bought a 300 watt inverter that came with a 10awg hardwiring kit. now, i ran it off the cig. lighter just to check, and it did work. but that was only for 20 mins. also, that was just dvd's and emus.

 

if you don't feel comfortable running the signal wire, just give it power from your battery. I am assuming you will be mostly playing DVD's so you are probably going to have to access the XBOX everytime you want to run it anyways. You might just have to use the manual switch. Its not the most convenient but I have had an XBOX setup like this before and faired OK.

 

The way I ran a gamecube in a previous install was to use a radio shack inverter designed to plug into a cigarette lighter (cheap). I bought a generic cig lighter outlet and a relay. I used a fuse tap and tied into a circuit for accessories at the fuse box for power from battery and tap into remote wire from the deck for the relay which in turn powered the cig lighter outlet.

I'm probably not explaining it well but its late...

It would have been easier w/o the cig lighter adapter but if everything went perfectly all the time that would be pretty boring.