tony.latham wrote:For some extra-extra stupid reason...
Tony
Yep, same pin functions, different colors. Back at some time in the past, one fellow did it one way for campers and somewhere else, some other fellow did it another way for cargo trailers, and somehow the two evolved to be "standards" independent of each other. Or something.
Good thing the pin functions are the same though. When I wired our tear, I used a separate 10 gauge cable (2 wires) to charge the battery, and used a 6 wire cable for the other functions. (Later decided to use a separate 2 wire cable for the brakes too.) Then, for the lights in the hatch, I used another 6 wire cable, BUT, the wire colors were slightly different from the 6 wire cable running through the rest of the tear. (And one of those wires was for the dome light, which of course is on a different 12 volt system than the safety lights.)
Luckily, the electrons don't care about the color of the plastic around the wire! But, although my memory is good, it isn't very long, so I bought a bunch of heat shrink of different colors (I know, I said that above--hah! Bet you all thought that was part of the memory not being very long!) Anyway, because I used screw type terminal strips, and soldered to the ring joints, I needed heat shrink to cover the solder joints anyway. If you crimp, you can still put heat shrink over the plastic protecting the crimps.
To me, +12 volts should be red, and ground should be black, so I used that for both this system and our 12 volt system for the tear internal lights, fan, etc. I didn't use purple, so I must have used the color codes on the right for most of the rest of the wires. I do remember duplicating red, for the stop lights as well. But then, I added a little box that takes the turn and stop signals, and breaks them out for separate turn signals and brake light. Out of that box, I used some dual color heat shrink.
The point is to take an otherwise very confusing system and make it so it makes sense to you.
Tom