For the clarification of others, we are just talking about charging the winch battery...

Camotanker, look at the first pic in my first post, and also the last pic in my first post. That should give you an idea of where the + and - connections are made.
In the last pic of my first post, there is an outer connector on my plug without wiring on it. That is the + wire connection.

The only thing that would concern me is with the charging connection in place, if the Winch drained your battery sufficiently, it might try to pull current from your truck battery, via your charging wire, and blow your fuse. This could be avoided by disconnecting your trailer plug from your truck connector whenever a winching operation was conducted, but you would have to remember to do that... You may wish to consider a self restoring circuit breaker for use in place of the fuse...

 

You would be better off running a line straight from the trucks batterys to your box and then have a power cord from your winch. That goes to your box and forget about a battery on your trailer. You know your truck will always have fully charged batterys.

 

nice info!
have some wiring issues on my triler that needs to be fixed.

 

Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion... i personally have a Battery (Optima) I use for my trailer winch. I don't charge it off the truck, I use a 120 VAC charger to keep it topped off.

I just charge it after use, and every once in a while when I think about it... It's been working fine for about 13 years now...

If I ever run across a dead battery situation for the winch battery, you can bet I'll swap in one of my truck Optimas to at least complete the work. (I also have dual batteries in my Jeep and Rock Buggy.)



The Solar panel idea is good... Especially in a sunny state suchas Arizona. My brother used a solar panel setup to keep his Boat battery charged, and it seemed to work fine.

bow2no1, let me know if I can confu... err.. help in any way!

 

If you wanted to disconnect the trailer while the truck is not running you could also put the battery wire on a relay and control it off ignition.

Yep them solar chargers are nice and easy to find these day.

 

bow2no1, did you get your trailer wiring sorted out?

 

i had to completely rewire my 18 foot car trailer while i was at home cause the wiring was junk PLUS the guy that owned my dodge before me hacked the wiring harness horribly (it actually SCARED me when i seen it) so now i got to completely rewire my Western Hauler bed since WH dosent sell a wiring harness for the beds, im waiting on them to send me a wiring diagram for it......im sure this is gonna be easy to tell my dad what to do over the phone......

 

Good luck with that...

 

thats what we did at work... we have warn winches on all our trailers and we just ran a seperate cable from the battery back along the frame and you do the same thing on the trailer... and there ya go plug it in just like you do for the trailer lights and it should be good to go