matthopp

I am pretty well done rewiring my horse trailer and I am getting ready to solder and close/seal the plug up. The only use I have now for a hot/aux wire is for the breakaway battery charger, but i dont plan on hooking that up b/c I dont think i will use it enough to put a good chrage on the battery. I may put some aux lights up down the road though. I dont like the idea of having a hot wire not running anything and hooked up all of the time; it is one more thing that can short out and I do not want to tap into my truck plug to put a switch in. For those that do not have any aux equipment on their trailer, do you still have the hot wire hooked up? To clarify, it is 6-way wire so the aux wire is already along the trailer.

roadranger

Like you, I've got the 12v hot wire into the truck plug.
I tow 3 different trailers, and the only thing that hot wire does, is charge up the breakaway battery, and run interior box lights on one of the trailers.

I think it's worth it to have the hot wire charge up the breakaway battery because there's no other way to get juice into it, and it'll eventually go dead.

fschiola

I do the same thing.

wannadiesel

As long as you put a fuse or circuit breaker up by the truck battery, what's there to worry about on the hot wire? If anything goes wrong it will blow the fuse or trip the breaker with no harm done. I've wired four vehicles this way with no problems.

TXRAM2

matthopp
I use the hot/aux for the interior and exterior lights. This way we can use the tack room, saddle/unsaddle, or have the lights on in the horse compartment, without having to turn the running lights on. When I got the trailer the courtesy lights were wired with the running lights, so I pulled the hot wire and seperated the circuits. It' real convenient not having to turn the truck lights on, to have light in the trailer.

jmho
wayne