Power voltage to brakes??
Never been happy with braking on our C Creek. Just installing all new brake assemblies and checked voltage at right rear and it shows only 9.5 volts!! This is not via the truck. I have it connected d...
Forum Discussion
ivbinconned wrote:
I pulled the breakaway pin to test off house batteries and gained a volt. 10 volts.
Yep, you have a lot of voltage loss, most likely due to some very corroded crimp connections.. Not unusual as the RV industry does not use weather proof crimps and moisture wicks into the connection.. Corrosion of copper creates an dull oxidized layer which conducts electricity poorly.
However as one poster mentioned, while you have the battery under load, take a voltage reading at the battery and then compare that to the voltage at your brake magnet connections.
The reason for this is while you battery may read 12.6V or 12.8V when no load is present, it can sag considerably under load if battery is partially discharged or no good at all.
Something else to consider, the brake wire is run in a pair or set, both pos and negative ground are run from tongue to the magnets. You do not want to use the trailer frame for measurements as it may skew your readings if there is a bad ground or ground wire at the front of the trailer. Do not be tempted to connect the magnets to the trailer frame at the rear of the trailer, doing so may result in poor performance and may also cause your brake controller to not properly detect the brakes (IE No connection messages).
Once you have good reading of battery under load you can now better determine how to proceed.
If you have some decent wire (14 ga or 12 ga) laying around, you could temporarily connect that wire from the tongue back to the first axle (disconnect the existing wire from the connections on the front and at the first axle). The remeasure the voltage.
If you get almost the same voltage as the battery at the first axle, then you have an issue with the wire running from tongue to the first axle. If that is the case, I would simply abandon the existing old wire in favor of running fresh new wire. Trying to find and repair brake wires can be difficult depending on how they ran them.. My current TT those wires were run inside the trailer walls..
