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Last changes 9/23/2007 |
One wiring trunk distributed from the
Electrical Compartment
is the wiring to the trailer jack.
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To start, here is a comparison with the standard Truck Trailer cable jack and
the RV Trailer cable jack. Only three wires are common.
The biggest difference is a truck trailer has separate turn and
brake lights while an RV trailer has combined turn/brake lights. |
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You cannot just tie the circuits together because doing so would activate the
right and left lights with any of the three signals (stop, right turn, left
turn). We could have used a couple of power diodes to provide the isolation
needed. However diodes drop .6 volts across them. The wiring for
the Volvo supplied enough current but following the basic rule of overkill in
wiring, We decided to use a power tail light converter to insure full power to
the trailer lights. |
click on image to enlarge |
We copied most of this from
Jack Mayer.
Jack has a lot of good information on his site. We will be
coping a lot of the things Jack has done.
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We copied Jack Mayer
and used a Hoppy 46255 powered tail converter. The Hoppy converter
takes the right turn, left turn, and stop signals in and puts out
the combined stop/right and stop/left signals. The Hoppy 46255
is powered so whatever we drive off of the Hoppy is not a load to
the truck circuits. We also used two terminal strips but we
used the standard styles. We find it easier to stack multiple
connections using screw connections then stuffing multiple wires
into the sleeve of the European style terminal strips. We
have the advantage of an isolated electrical compartment so the
terminal strips are less prone to shorts. We will probably
put plastic covers over the terminal strips when we are done. |
click on image to enlarge |
The Volvo trailer wiring is brought into one terminal strip.
The trailer wiring is brought into the other terminal strip.
The Hoppy converter is connected to the two terminal strips as well
as the brake controller wiring. This gives us a common place
to connect the add-on lighting of the rig like the headache rack
cabinet.
We mounted a circuit breaker on the distribution to control the
+12 volt power circuit to the trailer and that is also attached
to the trailer terminal strip. We may add a
Battery Combiner to the
+12 volt trailer circuit to provide battery protection for the truck
batteries while maintaining a good charge voltage. |
