High Voltage drop to slide motor

@RoyB That's it, the relays, there is none. So full current goes all around the trailer through the switch and back...

The reasons I wanna remove that drop is for motor longevity. Warranty will not help me in the middle of the woods hahaha ;)

@DrewE and @enblethen
Thanks for the tips, will check like suggested.
And as far as the battery I just installed better wiring and great ground to frame.

@darsben1 Warranty yes, afraid of dealer yes!! hehe. I got the time to do it right as opposed to the dealer, and after seing what they left out of the PDI...

@time2roll Wires is #10, I would not have to pull new wire because I have a run of #4 going beside it from the new battery location to converter, I could just tap in those and use relays.


The #10 it's like 30' run, so 60' total, a Voltage drop calculator says at 14 amp, from 13 volt should have a 1.7v drop...

I dunno after calculating that...
Knowing how the manufacturer make 12volt connection, I would not be surprised to see bad ones.

Thanks for the discussion people, I appreciate it all :)

My fifth wheel setup has a slide out as well and there is a couple of RELAYS mounted close to the battery and have cables going many feet away from the slide motor. This is what sends the 12VDC to slide motor when you operate the switch inside the trailer. I sometimes had to jumper my trailer battery with my truck jumper cables to make the slide motor work better... After looking around I found those connections for the long cables going to the slide motor were not tight and was getting hot on me...

Cleaned up all of the connections and re-tightened every thing up and all is back to normal again...

Roy Ken

How large is the existing wire? You need to decide if pulling new wire is worth the effort to you.

2017 Sportman Classic 181BH.
NOT IN Warraty?
Afraid of dealer?

No, that is not normal.
I would start following the line to look for major drop.
Make sure you check both the ground and the positive.
You could start by connecting jumper cable and use it as a test lead from meter.

Before such heroics, I would suggest doing some probing around to see where the voltage drop is occurring if you can. It's probably easiest with two people. Put your multimeter on the lowest DC voltage range you can, and measure across or between various connections on the positive and ground paths while running the motor. As a start, if you can, measure the drop along the positive path (the battery positive terminal to the motor positive terminal) with the motor running, and compare that to the same on the negative side: are they about equal? If one is 1.5V and the other 0.5V, for instance, you probably have a poor connection somewhere along the 1.5V side. Checking various points along that side should show where it lies.

This likely isn't your problem, but I used to have a house battery (since replaced) that had a poor connection with unacceptably high resistance in the battery terminal between the battery post terminal and the threaded stud terminal.