Horse Trailering Tips with Trisha Killion - #2 in the Series [VIDEO]

CowboySpirit.TV - Cowboy Spirit TV wants to help you and your horse stay safe in your journeys. So we’ve teamed with Trisha Killion and the folks at Transwest Trailers to put together a series of trailering safety videos.  

Trisha grew up in New Mexico where she showed & judged horses in 4-H and was also an active member of FFA showing replacement heifers. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Economics at Eastern New Mexico University in 2004 and then lunged at the chance to work for Transwest when the opportunity became available.  She has been taking care of the horse trailer department at the Kansas City location for over 2 years. It is her goal to help educate customers about safety, structure & general trailer maintenance. She is a self defined “Trailer Snob”; only carrying the best of the best brands within the trailer industry.  She resides in Liberty MO with her 2 little boys Roy & Kade who are 3 ½ & 1 ½. Trisha owns 2 quarter horses that are currently earning their keep at a feedlot in Granada, CO.

Trailer Tips with Trisha Killion #2: Electrical

 

 

Hi. It's Trisha Killion of Transwest Trailers bringing you another trailer tip to keep you rolling safely down the road for all of our friends out there at Cowboy Spirit TV.

Today I'm going to show you how to operate your living-quarter horse trailer. Now we're going to do a couple different segments on this one. We're going to do your propane systems, your water systems, and electrical systems. So today we're going to cover full electrical systems.

One the first things you need to do to get power in your trailer is come out and find where your battery kill switch is. This particular trailer's battery kill switch is located inside the battery box. So you can see that this trailer's been stored. And we have this to off. The reason we have this off is so there's not going to be draw on your batteries. So say you leave a stall light on or a living quarter light on, you turn this off. It's not going to kill these.

So we're going to go ahead and flip this to on. So now we're going to go ahead and hook up our shoreline power, really simple and easy to do. Go ahead and locate your cord. This one is a 30 foot cord. And I do you recommend that you at least have a 30 foot. It's really going to make it easier for you whenever you're parked far away from your power source.

So we're going to take and line up our prongs here. So this is where our source is going to be. We're going to plug this in. We're going to line this up and then tighten this neck on here. There we go. So that's on there. That's tight.

Make sure your cord is straight, completely, whenever you're getting this plugged in. The reason you want to do that, and this one's not straight. We'll straighten it here in a second. But the reason you want to do that is to keep that electricity from having to travel around corners and angles. That way you just get a better flow and faster supply.

So our cord is completely straight here. We're going to take and plug this in. Do make sure that you're getting plugged in to 30 amp power. The reason this is so important is if you plug into 15 amp power, you actually have too much draw from your trailer on that. And you can't get near enough power. So if you're trying to run your air conditioner, your microwave, your TV, your breakers are going to keep tripping, your main breaker in your trailer. So make sure it's 30 amp.

So we're going to take and just line this up. And now we're plugged in. Simple, easy. Do make sure that you have got the on/off battery switch that we talked about earlier to on. So that way it's going to charge your batteries.

And then, also, if you get somewhere and you don't have this same type of outlet that matches your trailer, your trailer should have come with an adapter. So go ahead and plug it into that. And then plug it into your power source. Do remember this will limit the draw, though, that you're getting on your trailer. So it won't supply near as much power as is required.

So here is our generator panel. This particular trailer has Onan 4,000 micro quiet. We've got our battery switch on out there. So we're going to go ahead and turn this on. Make sure we've got fuel. We've got just enough fuel.

You'll also notice it's going to show you how many hours are on the generator. This one has 12.7 hours on it. So new trailer, hasn't run very much.

So what we're going to do is we're going to hold down this button for approximately five to 10 seconds. And we're going to let this prime. The reason we want this to prime is so that way we can get fuel circulating up to our generator.

Lights on. Let's go ahead and fire her up. Hold this down. And you'll hear her fire up. And now you're set.

So a way to cheat to make sure you do have 110 power is to look over at your microwave and see if you've got full power to it. You can see, obviously, light comes on. It's asking me to set the clock here. So we do have 110 volts power. So now we're ready to operate a few systems.

So one thing I'd recommend is making sure that everything's working in your trailer before you leave. So you just come up here, make sure that everything is going to turn on. So we've got power here. So we're set there for the DVD player. Turn our TV on.

Next thing we're going to check will be the air conditioner. So we've got a wall unit here. And I'm going to go ahead and turn it on to cool, even though, granted, it's about 48 degrees outside. You're going to want to let that run and get cold for a while to make sure it is working completely. So leave that running. I'm going to say that 10 minutes or so just to make sure it's working properly.

You're also going to want to come over here. This is your control panel for all your systems and test everything. You hit this test button. And batteries right now are charging. This is actually going to show us where it's at level-wise-- low, fair, good. So, remember, at the end of winter when you're pulling this trailer out, early spring, pulling it out, getting it ready to go, that your batteries, if you hadn't stored them, could possibly be really low or dead. And you never want to leave your trailer just plugged in all the time because that will actually kill the batteries on your trailer.

So we're going to test everything. Our systems look good as far as water goes. We have de-winterized this trailer. And so everything is completely empty, showing you fresh, holding, and grey, and then the levels-- a third, 3/4, or 2/3 and then full.

This is going to be our pump. At the pump, I can hear it running. And then this is for the hot water heater, which we'll cover in our next episode.

Air conditioner is completely working. I feel it getting cool right now. I'll go ahead and turn this bad boy off. There we go.

So those systems are working. 12 volt, actually, will operate your radio system here, which is kind of nice. So you can just run that off of your batteries. And we'll go ahead and test this TV, make sure everything's working.

Another system that operates off of 110 volt will actually be your refrigerator here. So you'll notice we have temp set, mode, on/off. So I'm going to his this on/off button. And you see where it's saying LP. That's the mode. That stands for liquid propane.

AU for automatic. You'll notice it's flashing AU, AC, AU, AC. The reason it's doing that, if you choose automatic, it will always, always, always go to 110, which is AC. It stands for alternating current.

So go ahead and put that on for AC, so it's going to operate off 110. Now, the nice thing is once this gets cold, I mean you can go ahead and switch it over to LP and have your propane actually run this and keep it cold going down the road. So another nice feature on these fridges here.

And what I do recommend is having your fridge turned on for approximately 42 hours and then come out and check it. Make sure it's getting nice and cold before you go on your first road trip. That's the main thing when you're first firing up your trailer. Make sure everything's working before you take off because you don't want to find out 400 miles away from home that, oops, fridge is out in the trailer. So be sure to check that.

And those are your main 110-volt systems that I wanted to cover today. If you have any questions, let me now. We'll be doing more videos that are actually in depth for each application-- your fridge, as far as your convection ovens, your generators. So check back for more video. And remember, if just the tip isn't enough, to give me a call.

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