What you don’t see

[Rotnjonny]

I was chasing an electrical gremlin yesterday for a few hours. I snapped this pic and thought I would share it with everyone. For many, you are fully aware of what is hiding behind all those pretty pa els. For others, here is a glimpse of what you may have never seen….

[Gonefishing]

What a waist of wires

[fatcatzzz]

Yep I got one of those.

[432bartman]

Amazes me how there is no pride in doing a trailer wiring job. If you look at boats, everything is at it's proper length, well secured, and extremey tidy. The amount of crimp fittings that are used is horrible too.....It amazes me there aren't more electrical fires as these things bounce down the highway.

[jkxtreme]

This is a management and design problem. It's designed that way and management accepts it. In an industrial application an inspector would have a field day with a company doing this type of wiring. We had a motorhome for a while and at least they bundled the wires into groups so you could trace out issues. Some RV builders are starting to go to wire bundles but I guess Keystone isn't there yet.

[c2itcliff]

If you can clean that up, you might find some extra storage room.

[Rotnjonny]

I suspect there will come a day when I am looking for a project and I will start working on this. This will be a very tedious task. I would think that I will need to find one end of the strand and then cut out the excess and reconnect. I am sure that I will learn A LOT during the process. I’m not sure that I will gain any usable space as all of this is behind the wall in the front compartment, but it will certainly make tracing and future issues much easier

[jkxtreme]

As a side note here... our motorhome came with a large binder that contained all of the mechanical and electrical drawings. Our 5th did not come with any drawings. I contacted Keystone and was told drawings were not available.

[Rotnjonny]

I had a similar experience myself. Our class A had a wiring schematic similar to what we have in the automotive industry. Keystone appears to believe that “color coding” the wires is a reasonable substitution for standardize wiring. Every RV technician that I have spoken to that works on Keystone products has told me they don’t even attempt to trace wiring issues, they simply drop in a new wire.

[DutchmenSport]

Yea, first time I removed that same wall, I was shocked at the jumbled up mess. I thought about cleaning some of it up, but then decided against it. Everything was working perfectly fine at that point in time, so I decided NOT to disturb anything. Nothing was actually "broke" so, I followed my better judgment .... "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Maybe someday, I'll need to actually do something in that space with those wires, but so far, it hasn't happened yet.

My advise: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" You risk messing something up in attempting to fix a problem that is really not a problem.

[Rotnjonny]

Thank you for the advice. Like many things, it comes down to perspective. I operate under a few guiding principals….

1. Preventive maintenance - take care of it while it is working so that it doesn’t fail and cause bigger problems.

2. Do what is right even when it isn’t easy. From where I sit this isn’t right and needs to be addressed.