I do very little hauling in the winter, so the solar panel will give me a lot of comfort if I need to haul a horse to the vet hospital in winter. The trailer person said I could just plug it in, but you never know when an emergency might happen.
I suspect the trailer sales person might have been referring to plugging in a battery maintenance trickle charger which would do the same as a solar panel with regulator
The problem with that would be I would always be wondering if the power was on to the charger. A drop out circuit of the primary voltage Could light up a warning light to show the power was out.
if solar panel is used you will need to remove snow if there has been an accumulation, here that really would not be an issue as rarely is there any long term accumulation
I haven’t hauled my trailer since October, and have had to lift the trailer at least 6x over the winter due to droop. It still got nearly full power.
Solar panels are more trouble than they’re worth, imo. There’s a lot of pieces to that system that can fail.
The problem with a trickle charger (and I have one and have used it on my lawn tractor) is that I need to run an extension cord for it. Also, it takes a while to charge.
Do you all with goosenecks leave your trailer hooked to your truck so that you can take it for a spin every now and then?
We have had a hand crank on a large LQ trailer and it was horrible. The trailer was about 40ft long and around 18,000lb. Then we moved up to a larger LQ trailer, 52ft and 25,000lb and it has 2 hydraulic jacks. They are a life saver. We have also always removed our batteries for the winter (in Ontario) as they will freeze up here. We don’t use our gooseneck in the winter months as we also have a 2 horse bumper pull that we use in the winter months.
Now we did have a gooseneck camper trailer that had electric jacks. And let me tell you it is soooooo crazy slow. Like insanely slow. It was a 37ft trailer and around 12,000lb. We made a little block that we would shove in the button to raise or lower the trailer and just walk away for like 5 or more minutes and it might have gone up a few inches.
We have had so many trailers (dump trailers, horse trailers, camper trailers)with hydraulics (tractors as well) and have honesty not had many maintenance issues with them. Very little to fix and so totally worth it. So if you have a choice, go hydraulic jacks 1000000%! Unless you like standing around or holding buttons for long periods of time.
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I would not leave a truck hooked to a trailer for a long or even a short period of time. We left our LQ horse trailer hooked up to our Freightliner for a weekend and it actually drained both of our truck batteries. We had to boost them with a tractor as it needed extra power just to be able to turn it over.
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Thanks so much for this–and great solution just to remove the batteries. I also have a two horse bumper pull and have not decided whether to sell it or not (it is too small for one of my horses and a bit of a squeeze for another, but could be used in case of emergency).
