Awning light only getting 8.5v

That sounds like you have a high resistance/poor connection or a bad ground.

+1... check your connections for corrosion.

Where exactly did you measure the 8.5 volts? And what did you connect the battery cables to? Both hot and ground? Or just one or the other?

I agree it is probably a poor (high resistance) connection somewhere. You should be able to pretty easily find out whether it is the hot side or ground side and troubleshoot from there.

An excellent way to check your lights is to take a wire from the battery negative, and connect to the LED lights negative. If that makes things bright, then you are looking at the negative return from the lights.

If that does not, take the same wire from the battery positive to the lights positive. If that makes them bright, then you are looking at a problem in the positive feed, and likely voltage sharing with another load that would be taking the other 3.5 volts.

Is there another light, perhaps one that is usually bright when the LED lights are on, but now is off, or just barely dim?

It's an odd thing with two devices that normally run from +12 to ground, but the ground is not there so they run in a series circuit. The brighter the filament normally, the dimmer it is in a series circuit with a normally dimmer filament when sharing the available voltage.

Thanks for the replies. It is on the positive side, I guess I should have put that in the original post. I had 12v at the output of the switch. I measured the 8.5 v where the light strip starts. I cut the wires, and tested there.

There are 2 other lights that are on the same circuit. An orange light under the steps, and the goofy blue lights in the speakers.

I really thought it would be the light strip, and I went to the storage place to remove them, but the voltage find threw my plan off. I'll need to crawl underneath to check the voltage at the other light, but I didn't want to crawl around on the wet ground this afternoon.
hopefully I can get by this week and check more.

Well I found the problem, and figured I'd let y'all know in case it might help someone in the future.

There is a 2 amp fuse in a fuse holder at the bottom of the front awning leg. The wire on the fuse holder is pretty thick compare to the wire going to the lights, so I assumed it was for the motor on the awning. Turns out it is for the lights. The fuse in there the blades has some corrosion on them. I replace the fuse, and it works fine.

Thanks for the suggestion, it was a bad connection.

Thanks for the update. Glad it was an easy fix.

wowens79 wrote:
Well I found the problem, and figured I'd let y'all know in case it might help someone in the future.

There is a 2 amp fuse in a fuse holder at the bottom of the front awning leg. The wire on the fuse holder is pretty thick compare to the wire going to the lights, so I assumed it was for the motor on the awning. Turns out it is for the lights. The fuse in there the blades has some corrosion on them. I replace the fuse, and it works fine.

Thanks for the suggestion, it was a bad connection.

That would be a good location for dielectric grease or a spray of an electronic deoxidizing product. I like to use Caig Deoxit 5 or Deoxit Gold, depending on what I have on hand.