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Old 01-27-2020, 06:40 PM   #1
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Location: Sudbury, Ontario
Trailer: 2019 5.0 TA
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Trailer Warning Light

Good afternoon to everybody. Today I brought my 2015 Ford F150 in for service for a faulty warning light which appears on my dash reading "Trailer Not Charging Consult Owners Manual". It seems to be most problematic on cool humid days.

The Ford technician diagnosed the cause being the in box Connector which I had installed so that I could plug in my 5.0TA inside the box as opposed to having the trailer connecting wire going over the tailgate to plug into the bumper harness. Apparently when he disconnects the t connector wiring harness and reconnects the two factory connectors, the problem disappears; when he reinstalled the new connector in between the factory harnesses the warning light reappeared.

Has anybody else out there experienced this issue??

Cheers,

Mars
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Old 02-04-2020, 10:09 PM   #2
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Join Date: May 2014
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
Trailer: 2018 5TA
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Last summer we had a similar issue, one charge site working, then not, going between the box connector and then the bumper connector. Several trips to the shop later with no success in resolving the issue it became a major part reinstall. Happily the f150 is still under warranty.
If you’d like, I’ll send you a pic of the repair bills and you can see if any applies to your situation.
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Old 02-05-2020, 05:55 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by marsman View Post
Good afternoon to everybody. Today I brought my 2015 Ford F150 in for service for a faulty warning light which appears on my dash reading "Trailer Not Charging Consult Owners Manual". It seems to be most problematic on cool humid days.

The Ford technician diagnosed the cause being the in box Connector which I had installed so that I could plug in my 5.0TA inside the box as opposed to having the trailer connecting wire going over the tailgate to plug into the bumper harness. Apparently when he disconnects the t connector wiring harness and reconnects the two factory connectors, the problem disappears; when he reinstalled the new connector in between the factory harnesses the warning light reappeared.

Has anybody else out there experienced this issue??

Cheers,

Mars
Not that issue, but my F-150 is dead to me. At the moment, I have no tow vehicle. It has been experiencing intermittent starting issues that the dealership “can not duplicate” since October. Every time they convinced me to take it home and drive it more, I duplicated it the same day or the next morning. “We can’t get a code.” Cannot say how many times I’ve heard that. The latest is replacement of the body control module (@ $750) after problem duplicated 4 months into the whole ordeal. “We are 99% sure that’s its fixed.” So I pay the bill, go outside, insert key and attempt to start.......no crank, no start. Tech comes out, gets it started, brings it back into the shop. I check the next day. Tech tells me it started immediately after he disconnected the bed harness after getting some message on the screen about a trailer wiring problem. OK, so I installed it after taking delivery and it worked fine for four+ years. Guess I screwed up. But I ask him to use it that night to commute home and to come back the next day. He does so, and it doesn’t start in the morning. He jiggles some relays and gets it started. But driving in he sees light behind him. The auxiliary bed lights are on and he can’t turn them off. Arrives at shop and they go off with the headlights, but won’t turn on with the on/off switch in the bed. So now the bed lights are the focus off attention. We had a lightning strike before the intermittent starting problem cropped up. Didn’t hit the truck but hit a tree 20 yards away and blew the telephone interface on the house apart. The phone line is adjacent to where the truck was parked. Personally, I think EMP from the nearby strike created an electric potential and fried something. They don’t. I think they are clueless. And based on my ongoing experience, I would be skeptical that the extra harness is at fault. I would wager that if you replaced it with a new one, the new one would display the same message. I would like to say Ford sucks, but they all do. We are no longer driving mechanical machines down the road, we are aiming computers with electronic and mechanical parts and “sophisticated” electronic problems create extreme repair difficulty.
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Old 02-05-2020, 06:12 AM   #4
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Yes vehicles today are all about computers and electronics and they can get expensive and difficult to figure out true problem in the first place. I have a friend that has a 1970 Toyota Land Cruiser and we are replacing a wiring harness that involves removing the dash, amazing how easy that was and really how little there is to the whole vehicle guts lets call them. No fancy computers or electronics that's for sure.
Yes its proven today's vehicles last way longer but at times still not fun to deal with when problems arise.

Enjoy the journey.

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Old 02-05-2020, 07:48 AM   #5
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I have a trailer light connection issue in our fairly new Ram that I have never been able to get resolved. The tail light pin in the 7 pin connector works intermittently. Every time I get the dealer to look at it, it's working fine and they can find no problem. I check it often with a tester and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it works and when it doesn't...except that the few times we have been towing and needed the trailer lights as evening came, it didn't work. All the other pins always work fine, so at least I can turn on my emergency flashers and have flashing trailer lights, better than no lights at all. We rarely tow at night, but still a big annoyance to be unable to get the problem diagnosed and corrected. I have tried removing the pigtail connection from the factory bumper connector over to the bed connector, and also disconnecting the factory bumper connector....makes no difference - there's either a very intermittent short, or some malfunction in the multitude of electronics that control everything.
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Old 02-05-2020, 08:53 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by davidmurphy02 View Post
I have a trailer light connection issue in our fairly new Ram that I have never been able to get resolved. The tail light pin in the 7 pin connector works intermittently. Every time I get the dealer to look at it, it's working fine and they can find no problem. I check it often with a tester and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it works and when it doesn't...except that the few times we have been towing and needed the trailer lights as evening came, it didn't work. All the other pins always work fine, so at least I can turn on my emergency flashers and have flashing trailer lights, better than no lights at all. We rarely tow at night, but still a big annoyance to be unable to get the problem diagnosed and corrected. I have tried removing the pigtail connection from the factory bumper connector over to the bed connector, and also disconnecting the factory bumper connector....makes no difference - there's either a very intermittent short, or some malfunction in the multitude of electronics that control everything.
We’ve had problems with our 2019 Ram when plugging in our trailer ; IE Plug the trailer in and the lights don’t turn on , unplug trailer - reconnect and wiggle plug around , lights work
Checked cord , checked vehicle ,cleaned contacts all tested fine
Dealer says that the 7 pin receptacle Ram uses is a tight fit with certain cord connectors and a sloppy fit with others leading to poor electrical contact
I thought the dealer was giving me a load of BS but I did a search on the Ram truck forum and evidently there is some truth to what he told me ( Bargman - Hopkins )
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Old 02-05-2020, 11:59 AM   #7
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I had a brother in law who passed some years ago. He was a fantastic mechanic. His specialty was Case IH combines and big Tractors. Before you laugh, recognize that these machines cost many times that of pickup or a trailer. His single mantra as he diagnosed problems was “Those grounds will mess you up”. Many times as I worked on a variety of trailers, I found a grounding problem to be the root of my problems when I had intermittents.
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Old 02-06-2020, 12:39 AM   #8
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Originally Posted by C&G in FL View Post
... Every time they convinced me to take it home and drive it more, I duplicated it the same day or the next morning. “We can’t get a code.” Cannot say how many times I’ve heard that. The latest is replacement of the body control module (@ $750) after problem duplicated 4 months into the whole ordeal...
That's a red flag to me. Diagnostic trouble codes are great, but there is more to vehicle problem diagnosis than reading a code. Any tech who depends on a code to define the problem is not even trying to understand it, and replacing components nearly randomly (usually the easiest to swap, or the most profitable, or the one which was bad on some other customer's vehicle that had a vaguely similar issue) benefits only the shop.
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