Electric Front Jack

[Brittany Dogs]

Well here's a tip that falls into the category of "don't do this."

I have an electric front jack on the tongue. I love it and find it a worthwhile option. From day#1 I protected this jack with a black bag made for this exact purpose. It has a nice drawstring opening and you basically put the bag over the jack and draw the string tight so that the wind does not blow it off. The bag was purchased at Camping World.

When I come back from camping, the TrailManor unit goes into the garage and the trailer gets a bath as well as the coolers and anything else that needs cleaning. The last step for me after the cleanup is to put the battery minder on the Bergman connector using the adapter I made and that brings the batteries up to full charge and floats once the last little bit of charging is done.

This time was different. The battery minder was not going from red to green after sever days of charging. Most times the batteries need so little of a top off that the minder often goes green in a matter of 4-8 hours. This time after several days it was still red.

Did I accidentally leave the refrigerator on DC? Nope, I did that once and I'll never make that mistake again.

I would turn on an outside light on the trailer and the bulb was bright so I didn't have a large current draw draining the batteries way,way down but figured something still must have been left on.

So during winterizing yesterday, (a short year for camping and I'm sad) I went searching for the current draw.

The propane detector is off on my unit when the bathroom wall is down, so that's not it. A check of current draw was saying 1.2 amps. Ahhh, clue, that's typically a light. The oven light was off, so that's not it.

So I started pulling fuses. The last of all the fuses was the front electric jack and the current dropped to almost nothing once I pulled that fuse.

Dog gone it, the front jack light was accidentally left on and never noticed under that black weather protection bag. The bezel for the lamp was slightly burned and melted a bit. We never used the light and well, time to put electrical tape on the switch to keep it from being flipped on again.

So if you use one of those black bags, and if your front jack has a light on it, I suggest taping it in the off position.