Towing tow dolly lights don't work.

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Danzrebel

Member
Joined
Oct 17, 2013
Posts
8
Decided to tow a toad to beach Monday, and discovered the lights on tow dolly will not work with headlights on.
Lights worked as long as headlights were off??????
I hooked the tow dolly to my pick up and lights worked perfectly. HELP!!

I have a 2014 Minnie Winnie. Class C
 
Sounds like you have an issue with the receptacle on the RV. Disassemble it and see if any wires are disconnected or corroded.
 
when things start going wacky with automotive lights ... I start looking for a bad ground connection.

my way to do that is  I take a long piece of wire and connect one end of it to the ground terminal on the battery.

then touch I the other end of the wire to the ground of every light assembly that doesn't light up quite right....you'll find it.
 
Thanks for the info, but the receptacle is working fine. As I said before when I plugged the tow dolly into my pickup everything worked as it is supposed to. Only when plugged into the RV and the headlights turned on nothing on the tow dolly works. Turn head lights off and all the lights start working. I'm totally lost and down to thinking it must be a safety thing on the RV.

 
Have you used this tow dolly with your motorhome before??  Are there LED lights on your tow dolly?  If no to first question and yes to second, i may have a simple solution.  I had similar problem on my VIA. 
 
Danzrebel said:
Thanks for the info, but the receptacle is working fine. As I said before when I plugged the tow dolly into my pickup everything worked as it is supposed to. Only when plugged into the RV and the headlights turned on nothing on the tow dolly works. Turn head lights off and all the lights start working. I'm totally lost and down to thinking it must be a safety thing on the RV.

When I said receptacle, I was talking about the outlet on your RV not the plug on the tow dolly. If the lights work OK hooked up to the truck, that narrows it down to something on the RV.
 
When the headlights on the RV are on, the tail light circuit to the towing plug receptacle is activated. Either the receptacle on the RV is wired in an incompatible way, or there is some corrosion there that interferes with proper operation. Typically that symptom involves loss of the trailer ground connection when the tail-lights come on.

It's not unusual for RVs to have non-standard receptacle wiring, especially if they have separate stop & tail lights (the dolly stop/turn lights are integrated into one dual-pin bulb).
 
Sounds like something is hosed up with the chassis wiring or a fuse is out. Buy an inexpensive outlet tester like this one and see what doesn't work. I keep one in the Horizon just because. Once in a while I'll have trailer lights that don't work, I plug the tester in and immediately isolate the problem.

Also find where your trailer outlet fuses are located (they are hidden under a bay panel on ours) and check them.
 
Sounds to me more like something is wired backwards at a relay.

OP says trailer lights are on when RV headlights are off, and trailer lights are off when RV headlights are on.

Working just the opposite that it should... strange.
 
emiddleb said:
Sounds to me more like something is wired backwards at a relay.

OP says trailer lights are on when RV headlights are off, and trailer lights are off when RV headlights are on.

Working just the opposite that it should... strange.

yes on the typical Bosch style 5 prong relay you can move one wire, from the load A terminal to the load B terminal and it changes from a normally open switch, to a normally closed switch.

 
Thanks for the advise. Where is the relay located. I've checked fuses, wiring and everything I could think of and still at a total loss.
If I knew where the relay was maybe I could switch wires around.
 

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