Dont buy grounding kits - Toyota Nation Forum : Toyota Car and Truck Forums

joemaniaci · 10-30-2006, 02:42 PM

I just went out to my car with my multimeter and took some readings for resistance from the engine block, intake manifold, and the throttle body and I have come to the conclusion that grounding kits will do nothing to inctease ground. I couldn't get any readings over 1 Ohm, pretty much all of them were .3 Ohms. I was going to make my own to improve my idle(hopefully my idle air control valve on order will fix it) since grounding kits usually improve idle. I even took some wires and just did a quick test and attached various parts of the engine to the battery and yeh, did absolutely nothing. I guess the factory grounding points are pretty good.

Toyo Tech · 10-31-2006, 04:19 PM

wait what are you trying to ground and why are you grounding?
and you should be very careful with resistance tests you could damage the ecm and fry it so I would highly advise against it.

joemaniaci · 11-02-2006, 01:55 AM

No, you can never have too much ground. I was referring to the ground used primarily for the engine. On some cars if you ground things like the intake manifold, throttle body, transfer case and the engine block to your battery, you can actually gain some horsepower. But the resistance to all those parts to the battery is very low so a grounding kit wont do a thing. Unless you have bad grounds.

Frank@toronto · 11-02-2006, 06:19 AM

A multimeter is not a good instrument to measure low impedances.

What you need is a "bonding" meter. It can measure as low as 0.00001 ohms. You need to find someone who has one (typically someone working for an electrical company).

joemaniaci · 11-03-2006, 04:46 AM

Yeh but I dont think a a micro ohm is gonna make much of a difference, much less 1 ohm. So getting any better than .3 ohms isn't going to do anything

Frank@toronto · 11-03-2006, 05:03 PM

No, but 300 milli ohms vs. 30 milli ohms is quite a difference, that cannot be measure with a regular multimeter.

joemaniaci · 11-06-2006, 03:36 PM

Yeh there is a big difference in numbers, but there won't be a difference in performance. I am pretty sure that even if you could change your grounding points from .3 ohms to 30 milliohms, you still would not get a performance boost, and even if you did, it would be too slight to notice.