horse trailer blows the CTD fuses!

[VGiacalone]

When I hitch up my horse trailer, the turn indicator and brake light fuses blow. The setup has worked just fine for a year and a half, and now it's a mess. These are both 15 amp fuses, which I replaced, and they immediately blew again when I hitched up.



How do I determine whether it is the truck or the trailer with the problem?



Speak slowly guys, and use little words, I'm a pretty bright woman, but an electrical idiot (I was actually pretty pleased that I could read the owners manual and figure out the fuses)...



Any helpful ideas from the TDR guys would be appreciated!



Thanks,

Valarie

 

[AggieJustin]

Sounds like you've got a bad spot of wiring on one of your rear lights on the trailer. Since you're blowing both the marker lights and the brake lights, I'd look for a problem near each of the brake lights on the trailer. If that's all in good shape, take apart the plug and make sure everything is OK in there. Sometimes you can get water in the plug that corrodes out all the connections.



I doubt it's a wiring problem with the truck, since it doesn't cause a problem without the trailer. Whenever you plug in the trailer, you're introducing a short to ground that causes the fuses to blow.



JM

 

[AfterBurner]

Have you hooked it up to other trailers? If so, do you get the same effect?



Could be that one of your plugs is wired wrong, although this wouldn't be an issue since you said nothing has changed. Unless, you had to get some wiring fixed at a shop, ie light bulb replacement, torn wiring that got rewired, etc. Beleive it or not, shops are probably the worst for screwing up wiring. One time when we got ours back everytime you hit the right turn signal the trailer breaks would hit!

Could also be that some insulation got eaten through somewhere along the wires and they're touching, causing your short.

The best thing to do is lift the trailer up, crawl under it and check your wires any obvious problems, before you pay someone to look at it.

For some reason, even though trailers are really easy to wire up, they never seem to work right, must depend on how close Mars is to Earth.

As the saying goes "but officer the lights were working when I left town"