Electroluminescent Mountain Bike

Step 6 Testing the Wires

EL Wire for the most part is pretty durable stuff. You can twist it, flex it (within reason), and it always stays lit. The inverters however, are not durable, and are easy to break, especially if you get a cheap one (Below $6). The simple rule is to never give power to the inverter without it having some wire to light up. If it is given power without a load placed on it, it will very rapidly overvolt itself, and become toast (unresponsive). You can tell if an inverter is on by the annoying high-pitched buzzing sound it makes, this is from the conversion from DC to AC, higher frequencies are more noisy (but brighter too).



Power Polarity
I have a picture attached showing my inverter. Though it runs on 12v, it receiving it's electricity through a 9v battery connector. Just think of how that connector would access electricity from a 9v battery, on which the small circle is the positive (+), and the square or hexagon is negative (-). Reverse it for 9v connectors. For the connector on my inverter, it is expecting "its" small circle to be taking negative and "its" hexagon to be receiving positive, don't get the power backwards on them, as the inverter can break. I've attached two pictures showing how this backwards polarity problem works.

Straight from the Power Pack
Attach your quad connector to the inverter, and plug in some EL-Wire. Try to power more than the minimum amount, just to be safe to test it (it's meant to always have load). Simply attach the 9v connector to your battery pack, just make sure the positive is definitely going into positive (it's your wiring, you can adjust it to your setup, and use a multi-meter to double-check voltage).