Backup lights wiring help

This topic has 5 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 10 months ago by Chewy.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Author

Posts
July 28, 2021 at 1:00 pm #700079

Chewy
Participant

I just put on the Tecniq Salmon LED’s. I cannot get them to work. My power wire is a red wire running the length of the trailer on the starboard side. From there I splice that into the black wire on the starboard side light. From that I ran it to the black wire on the Port side light. I ran the white wire from my Starboard side light to the white wire on my port side light. I am assuming the lights ground themselves because they are bolted onto the frame where I took the old rectangular lights off. All of the other lights on the trailer are working excepts the two backup lights.

If anyone has experience with the LEDs and have some ideas for me I would greatly appreciate it.

After posting this I remembered I never checked voltage. I checked and I do have 12v at the hot wire coming in and also 12v in both the black and white wire running between the two lights. Seems like they should work.

July 28, 2021 at 2:33 pm #700080

Rich12
Participant

Are the lights themselves grounded?

July 28, 2021 at 4:42 pm #700085

Chewy
Participant

I’m not sure. I do not have a ground wire going to a ground on the trailer. I was assuming the bolt that hold it to the trailer grounds it out. I set the new lights up the same the old rectangular lights were set up. Not sure if the new LED lights make it different on the setup???

July 28, 2021 at 7:55 pm #700090

Bass Cat Boats
Keymaster

LED lights are directional, check your power with a voltmeter and if you’ve got power reverse the wires.

July 28, 2021 at 9:35 pm #700092

sightfish
Participant

This may seem like no brainer but take lights off and run them direct to spare battery 1) to give you confidence they work, 2) figure out exactly how they need to be wired to work. Much easier to play around with grounding etc for me when I’ve removed as much complexity as possible. I bought some backup lights recently and had to do this to figure out exactly what was going on. Trailer lights and plumbing are scary for everyone.

July 29, 2021 at 11:06 am #700097

Chewy
Participant

They work!!! I’m going to give a rundown in case anyone else has some issues. What I did wrong was assume a positive and negative based on the color of the wires. I took Sightfish’s advice and took one of the lights off my trailer and put the wires to a common 9 volt battery. By doing this I learned the white is the positive wire and black is ground. This let me know I did need to ground these new lights. The old ones did not need to be grounded. Now that I learned white is positive I ran the power to the starboard light. I then ran a wire to the white on the port light. I took the black wires and grounded them to the bolt that holds the light to the mounting frame for the light on the trailer.

A big thank you to everyone for giving me ideas and helping out. I made a lot of extra work for myself by assuming the new lights would work just like the old rectangular lights. Once I slowed down and thought things through it was an easy job. One more thing I would do is put the boat in the water and do this work without the boat on the trailer. This will prevent you from rolling around on a dirty garage floor.
Author

Posts

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login Register