Power voltage to brakes??

ivbinconned wrote:
Thanks. I had hoped that by soldering all connections at both ends of both axels I would get better results but if any it was only slight.
I did hook up to my much lighter goose neck flat deck and by pulling the brake lever the tires stand.
So. Would you recommend an aftermarket controller because of the weight of the trailer.
Where good response trailer brakes becomes very necessary is when descending a long grade in icy and snowy conditions.

Believe it or not, your IBC is much better over any of the current aftermarket controllers even with some of the short comings of it.

Comparing your gooseneck which is lighter and most likely shorter than your RV tells me controller you have is fine. If you had same problem with gooseneck that you have with the RV then the problem would be more likely on the truck end.

The only aftermarket controller I liked was the Jordan Ultimate 2020 which used a physical cable attached to your brake pedal.. That direct physical connection didn't rely on brake lights, brake light switches or complex computation curves required by accelerometer type aftermarket controllers. By the way, the accelerometer based controllers just like your IBC also trim down the output while sitting still. Stands to reason, if you are sitting still no need to keep applying the max output.

Unfortunately The Jordan Ultima 2020 was sold to Camco, Camco promptly dropped the entire brake controller business and the only option is to find used units and most folks that have one would rather take them to their grave over parting with them.

You had stated that you were getting 9V-10V at the axles when you pulled the break away pin, that is a huge drop from 12.5V at the trailer battery! A 3.5V drop is unacceptable, I would have expected not much more than .5V! You have either too light of wire from tongue to axle or you have damaged wire from tongue to axles. This voltage drop is excessive and using the trailer battery via the break away switch removes your truck as the main source of the problem.

Go back and reread my post which gives the wire gauge resistance and you can see for yourself how much percentage of braking power you can lose..

You really need to try to bypass the wire going from front to the axles, even if it is temporary to see if you have hidden damaged wiring. While wire now days isn't cheap, you could buy some 10 gauge SJ jacketed cable with three 10 gauge wires. Use that for a test, if you see an improvement as in less voltage drop then you may wish to consider bypassing the OEM wire permanently.

You could even use that SJ jacketed cable to make the bypass permanent or buy RV 30A 120V ends and make it an extension cord for your RV shore cord from the wire you bought for the test.

You can also use a 30A RV extension cord as a temporary bypass by buying 30A replacement plugs and make adapters for each end that terminate with wire..

You can even buy a couple of 25-50ft rolls of stranded "building wire" from Home Depot or Lowes (one in black and one in white) and use that as a bypass and even still use it if you need to bypass the OEM wire permanently.

Lots of ways to approach the problem.