Abused By Teardrop Wiring!

 

My Timberleaf Pica teardrop came with three different battery charging posibilities.

(1) Solar, which is my #1 choice.

A panel coupled with a decent solar charger is a gentle, mostly hands off, and fully self-suporting option that 95% of the time keeps up with my needs with virtually no active input from me. (I might pay passing attention to sun-exposure when choosing a campsite but that's not my first priority especially since I can remove the panel and set it out in a sunnier spot.)

(2) A shore-power charger, commonly called a converter, and, as is mine, often built into the power-distribution center.

This option requires being hooked up to shore-power - obviously - so it's not a self-supporting system. And because of our irrational obsession with size it's actualy pretty harsh on the battery. Seriously! What is the point of having a 40 Amp charger hooked up to an 80 Ah battery?

It's not like I'm pulling in to an EV charging station and am itching to get back on the road again by the time I pee and grab a snack!

If I hook my teardrop up to shore-power I'm going to be there for at least 8 hours. A nice, small, lighter, less expensive, 15 Amp charger is more than enough to take care of my needs, but you can't buy a power distribution center/converter in this practical and functional size.

Which makes no sense because all batteries, even Li's, appreciate and thrive on gentle foreplay and just like any of us, being repeatedly slammed with a hard pounding wears them out and shortens thier life.

Fortunately my Timberleaf was wired with a dedicated breaker for the converter. I leave this turned off, only occasionally flipping it on for a few minutes to confirm that the converter is still working.

If I want to use shore-power charging, say if the battery is down to 20-30% and I'll be parked deep in the woods for a few more days, I'll flip the breaker on then keep an eye on the battery monitor and shut the charger back off at about 80% charge to minimize battery abuse.

(3) DC to DC charger.

This device takes the raw output from the vehicle's alternator - which might be as high as 16V -

coming into the trailer on pin 6 of the 7-way connector, and tames it down to the proper algorithm for charging Li batteries without damaging them. Handy for putting a charge into the house battery when the vehicle is running.

I had one of these on The Van but rarely used it, so when I discovered that the DC to DC charger on the teardrop wasn't working it wasn't that much of an operational issue because I was getting along without it just fine. But it was a brain issue! One of those things that gives a person, at least one like me, itchy-brain. So I decided to figure out what was going on, even though that meant standing on my head and contorting in ways no human, let alone an old-man human, was designed for. After all, even if I don't use it, that DC to DC charger is supposed to be working!

But! While wiring diagrams for the trailer running-gear, lights, brakes, etc., are easy to come by, for some damn reason it’s rare to find an RV manufacturer that makes wiring diagrams available for the house-systems of thier products. (This is why I should stick to building things myself! I know where every wire in the cargo trailer and both our barns goes because I put them there - and still have the wiring diagrams to fall back on when I start losing my mind! I know - I know. There's some that claim I've already lost it, but they don't understand that some things were never in there in the first place so they weren't mine to lose - - -)

It's not like they don't have them. The diagrams are there for workers building the units. It's just that they apparently don't give a damn about the poor smuck that buys their shit!

Admittedly, most of us can't decipher such a diagram, but what about the repair person you call in? They could certainly use it!

When you buy a washing machine it comes with a wiring diagram - or at least one you can download from the manufacture's site. It's not neccessarily for you, but for the repair person you will have to rely on one day.

But the mobile RV repair guy, which in my case is me, is shit-outa-luck!

So here we go!

Once I verified that the truck is delivering the charge voltage to the 7-way I knew the issue was within the trailer. More specificly, probably back there behind the fire extinguisher where all the electrical/electronic stuff is hidden.

So now it's time to start taking things apart and try to create my own wiring diagram so I can figure out how it's supposed to work and from there what the hell is wrong!

The cloth is covering the positive terminal of the battery to prevent mishaps. Though I have the disconnect switched off, killing power to pretty much everything, that terminal is still hot and chassis-grounds are all over the place inside this small space. Inadvertently connect the two with a dropped tool and - well, it wouldn't be good!

Speaking of dropped shit, a trick I use when working in small, crowded places like this is to put a small magnet on my driver bit, sockets, or wrench so they hang onto ferrous screws, nuts, and bolts rather than letting them fall into some inaccessible space.

Using eyeballs and my meter I chased the incoming charging voltage from the 7-way, down the length of the trailer, to this auto-resetting circuit-breaker where the incoming black, or hot, wire changes to two seperate red wires that spiral off, along with the accompanying white ground wire, into the spaghetti-maze of like-colored wires stuffed into this small space.

Another quick meter-check shows the breaker is passing the charge voltage on through.

Crap! That means I have to start chasing individual wires snuggly bundled together with a lot of other wires, through tight spaces to figure out where they go and what's gone wrong! (If only there was something like - oh I don't know - a friggin WIRING DIAGRAM!)

After a lot of contortion, cutting of cable ties, unscrewing of cable clamps, scraping of hands, and a few scathing words, sometimes muttered, sometimes enunciated very loudly, I still wasn't any the wiser (it didn't help that one or two of the wires changed colors at butt-splices buried inside cable-bundles!), so I went at it from the other end to see if things would be any easier to track down. (Spoiler alert- no!)

I knew that in the panel just above the electronics bay I was rooting around in was a switch to enable/disable the DC to DC charger. (And yes, long before embarking on this folly I tried the switch in both positions just in case it had been installed upside down!) So I figured I'd start chasing from that end instead.

Well that wasn't any easier!

Oh, it was easy enough to figure out that the black wire plugged into the back of the switch was ground and the green hot, so that orange wire must be the one turning the DC to DC charger on and off. Chase it down and it will lead me to whatever is actually doing the controlling.

OK, yeah. That didn't work out quite so well.

You see - that orange wire disapeared, along with a bunch of other wires, none of them orange, into a wire loom (think plastic conduit) that loops through the living compartment and into the back of the electronics compartment - only there's no orange wire coming out the other end!

I had to stand on my head in the living compartment and tear open the wire-loom to discover that, buried deep inside that loom the orange wire was butt-spliced to a - oh crap! - red wire. Do you know how many red wires there are coming out the other end of this loom?! Five! I counted!

Eventually I managed to track that orange-then-red wire to this relay buried about as deep as you could get in the back of the electronics compartment, just above the battery and squeezed between the power-distribution center and the shore-power inlet, as far away from the actual DC to DC charger as you can get in here.

While I was nursing an aching head and trying to figure out how I was going to get that relay out so I could test it without disassembling the whole damn compartment, I also got to wondering

why the hot wire for the switch in the panel above was being fed through the battery monitor instead of directly to the switch.

So, to postpone trying to extract that relay, I decided to try and figure out the whole battery monitor side-trip thing.

I've been using this model of battery monitor - this is my third - for many years, but this is the first time I've seen these terminals on the back being used.

So I did some poking around in the blue-tooth interface for the monitor and buried in the 'settings' I found another tab for 'relay'

And found that this relay is for controlling an inverter (which I've never had and still don't), making sure the inverter is shut down if the battery charge-level gets below a user-defined threshold.

But more importantly, notice that the relay is disabled!

As soon as I enabled that relay through the interface and turned the orange-wire switch on, the friggin DC to DC charger started working!

Why in the hell someone decided to wire a switch to a relay through another relay, I have no idea. And one day I'll get my tools back out and bypass that monitor-relay altogether since it is unneccessary and completely redundant as well as introducing complications and potential failure points!

Now- maybe I should start drawing my own wiring diagram for next time? - Nah, maybe later -

Don’t Hit Me!

 I knew, even before it was in my hands, that I would be making modifications to the teardrop, that’s just the way I’m wired.

After a 6 month wait for it to get through the build schedule, in early June the trailer was finally ready - - and sitting in Grand Junction CO.

I was not.

So first thing on the list was a road trip to go fetch the damn thing back to where it belonged. I’m not used to making road trips without my living quarters on my back, so the first day was a long drive because I didn’t want to screw around homeless any longer than I had to. I didn’t leave the house until the day before my appointment at Timberleaf Trailers and made it across three states and one mountain pass to Salida CO where (shudder) I found a motel room for the night.

Next day I was in Grand Junction about three hours early for my appointment  after crossing the 11,000+ foot Monarch Pass and what Colorado calls two “crests” (most would call them serious passes with chain-up areas, runaway ramps and permanently mounted closure-gates) on US50.

That night I was camped on BLM land with my new trailer and already knew what my second upgrade project would be.

I was parked at a noticeable angle, not something I normally worry about (compressor fridges like I use to avoid the need for a mounted propane system work just fine up to a 30° angle), but this night the slope had me rolling across my air-mattress into the wall, and it was a bitch to get myself sorted out and upright uphill when it was time to get out of bed, well, at least up on my knees since there's no "upright" in here, because there was no place to grab onto. I was like a turtle turned upside down and waving my flippers around desperately! So, grab-handles! Four of them. on order from Amazon before I even got home.

But my first project was definitely going to be correcting the Department of Transportation’s criminally inadequate minimum lighting requirements.

For trailers less than 80” wide and less than 10,000 gross, the USDOT requires ONE tail light (Most states add to that and require the usual two) a pair of brake lights and a pair of turn signals. And they don’t require them to be separate lights, they can be combined into a pair of single 2 or 3-function fixtures, each with a minimum of 3.5 square inches of luminous surface area. Yep, that’s right 3.5, which is equivalent to a round light just barely more than 2” across!

I guess these people have never come up behind a slow-moving trailer in a heavy rain!

 Even when the minimums are exceeded by a factor of three, as they were on the trailer as it came from the factory (which is a 6 person combination workspace and showroom with a half-dozen trailers in various stages of production at a time), that’s not good enough in my books.

One slight problem.

The roof, including the rear-hatch, are built up glue-ups with the various bits being cut on a CNC machine which also routes out pathways for wiring which is added before the final glue-up, and the tail lights are very firmly glued in so access to the wiring on the back of them was non-existent. So unless I wanted to really hack-up the rear hatch, its real estate was not available for any additional lighting.

So I sourced these narrow lights, just shy of 17 sq. in. of luminous area each, that would fit on the frame of the trailer between the two heavy rubber blocks that act at bumpers. I made sure they met another criteria in that they also act as reflectors. Good thing too! But I'll get to that in a moment.

And while I was at it I picked through my leftovers pile and found a set of these 3/4" press-in LED lamps to add as front and rear fender clearance lights. Not stipulated by DOT standards but required by common sense!

To simplify wiring things up I bought a trailer wiring kit for a 4-way connector so I'd have plenty of length of the proper wire-colors, then climbed under the trailer, not all that difficult since it is only a few inches short of 2 feet off the ground, where the existing wiring harness, though neatly installed and anchored down, is accessible,

 and with my tools, rubber tape, plastic cable-way, and clamps, I spliced into the existing wiring harness,

drilled through the rear frame member and wired up the new tail-lights. I even added the vehicle-end of the 4-way connector that came with the wiring harness so that if, for some reason I throw a basket or something on the rear receiver that comes as part of the trailer, I'll have an easy way of lighting it up.

Adding the press-in lamps to the fenders was just a matter of running more wire in more cable-way fastened down with more clamps and drilling some holes.

There, much better - - except,

DOT also requires reflectors, even on small trailers. Now maybe the original tail and side lights were marketed as reflective, but this night shot clearly shows that until I added my own tail lights there was nothing reflective about the rear, or sides of this trailer.

Well my leftover parts box has that covered too, in the form of some 2" wide red reflective tape. So I added some of that on the rear and sides of the trailer to become compliant, and more importantly, visible!

I've used this stuff a lot on various projects and never had it peel off or lose its luminescence.

As you can see, it doesn't take much light, not even enough to make the frame visible here, to make this tape really glow.

But this was just the first of a number of modifications I've already made to the teardrop.