This is very odd....

I took a chance and did the vampire wire tap directly to my rear lamps, and went to the trailer. My new trailer has 14 light bulbs that are not LED!

I was sure I was going to blow a fuse. But nope. I've used it for over 3000 miles now, with nearly 1/4 of that at night, and without issues.

Do I feel there is potential for overload, sure.
But I'm not going to spend any more money,... as long as it works, it works!

FWIW, when I added LED turn signal lamps to my FEH, they draw so LITTLE current that the car thinks they are burnt out and beeps and prints on the dash "Check Turn Lamps". So I replaced them with the stock ones.

I've not yet had any issues with overload, just under-load!
Weird. Cool, but weird.
-John

 

Interestingly the the turn signals are now working without interruption. I'm beginning to think there is a wiring problem in the trailer.

The running & brake lights never had a problem from the start.

Valley had promised to send a new module but it has not yet arrived to my knowledge. Glad we didn't wait for it.

 

RE: resetting the blinkers.

When they reach the nothing resets them point pull the fuse for outside lights in the engine compartment fuse & distribution box. Look it up but for me it was the third from the rear on the pax side of the box, a 25 amp fuse. It was never blown. Pulling it seems to reset circuitry when the car is shutdown.

 

I have a Hidden Hitch and the module with separate power, but I never got it to work. Put it in last August to haul a trailer across town and just did without the lights for the daytime short haul. Doing the same thing this coming August but the haul will be about 3.5 hr.s. Guess it's about time to figure out what didn't work.

 

To my knowledge the new module promised by Valley has not arrived.

 

I kinda wondered if maybe I didn't have a good enough ground. I put the ground screw into the body panel behind one of the tail lights. The next move I had in mind was to find somewhere more solidly metal underneath to land the ground.

 

The ground is a good candidate. I put mine into the sheet metal behind one of the tail lights. So long as you drilled the right size hole for the screw and tightened it without getting so tight as to loosen the screw, I don think you setup was bad.

You might try a temporary ground, a long piece of wire run from the back to the front and hooked into on of the battery ground points close to the 12v battery. Use this to try out the wiring. If it makes a difference then go in and do a more permanent wire run.

 

On my first trailer, a flatbed tiltbed, the grounding on the TRAILER was terrible. Took me many hours to track down the fact that there was no continuity between the front of the trailer and the back. The tiltbed, due to the bearings, was in essence, insulated from the tounge, and the lamps were on the tilting part.

As soon as I ran a second (ground) wire to all my lamps, all was well.
The 1 wire to each bulb, using the trailer frame for the ground did not work well in my case.

A faulty ground is a good suspect.
Good Luck.
-John

 

"The box that was required for the earlier FEH's (Mines an '06)"

Do you mean that 06s and above don't need any special box?

 

My experience was: marker lights & brake lights worked just fine. The turn signals, however, would only work for a few minutes. Oddly a few minutes varied from about 1 to as much as 10 minutes.

So I believe that the "box" with a separate power line going forward is needed. Valley agreed to send me one the second week of June, by overnight, but it hasn't arrived after several weeks.

As you might imagine I used the turn signals sparingly and spent a lot of my trip in the right lane so as not to need turn signals much.

The Valley guy I spoke with acknowledged they have been seeing this problem and had developed a "different box" with a separate power feed.