Bulldog Winch 5-Switch Voltmeter Panel w/Breakers

Video Transcript for Bulldog Winch 5-Switch Voltmeter Panel with Breakers Travel Trailer Installation

Hi there Mantis owners, today your 2020 TAXA Mantis. We're gonna be taking a look at Bulldog Winches Voltmeter and Switch Panel. Now this is what our switch panel looks like when it's installed. It does flush the mount right into the wall of your camper motor home, or potentially even your truck or trailer. I like how the panel is so robust. All of our components have rubber boots on them to protect it against any dirt, debris and moisture.

They're circuit protected. You can press the reset buttons here at the top to reset those as necessary. And we have five switches available. To power various different accessories that we have. When you turn on any switch it will illuminate the light, showing that power is being sent through this switch and circuit to whatever accessory is connected to it.

Our volt meter here on the side, will help us monitor the condition of our battery. So, we can kind of have an idea of what charge we're currently at. And I also like to use it as kind of a test to help me know the condition of my battery. So we turn on a really heavy load. We could expect a certain amount of drop in voltage, and if we put on the same load and we've got a much higher drop in voltage than what we previously had before, when we we're monitoring this, that likely indicates that the batteries are a little bit weak also included with your kit, you're gonna receive a sticker sheet with various different stickers on it, and this is great for labeling your switches once you've wired them up, so that way you can easily remember which switch is for what and if anybody else gets in your trailer they'll have an idea of what's going on.

So example, if you we're putting a blower maybe a vent or something on one of these switches, you could put that sticker there. This is a typical coil there for maybe like a heater circuit. Maybe you have a wheelchair ramps. This is a good one for air conditioning, audio. So there's a lot of different options here to ensure you know what's going on with each circuit.

If we take a look at the backside of our panel we have several switches down here at the bottom, a total of five, the three switches located here which would be the left side, If you we're looking at the front face of the panel, all are protected with five amp circuit breakers. The switch just to the inside of those five amp ones is going to have a 10 amp breaker on it. And then the last one here closest to the voltmeter will have a 15 amp breaker. The voltmeter is also protected with a five amp breaker of it's own. And you can see here it operates more than just our heater, we've got some lights wired up on the back, we can turn them on and off with these, and this way we can illuminate the back of the campsite easily, right here from inside of our camper. We'll begin our installation by determining where we want to put our switch panel. Our customer had already mounted a switch down here in the lower section but he doesn't like the single switch there. He wants to have a more versatile switch set up here plus there's circuit protection, for each of these circuits, So it's kind of nice, it keep everything protected for you, so you don't have to worry about adding fuses or anything like that down the line. So we're going to be replacing this. So we're going to have it kind of low here. You can put it wherever you'd like, though, really doesn't matter. Now we're putting it here, replacing the switch on our customer's travel trailer. But you can use the switch panel with really just about anything, whether you're wanting to put it in your boat, your travel trailer, your RV, even a truck, this would be a great switch for different accessories. So we've gone ahead and removed the switch that was there. And we're just gonna use the gasket that comes included with the kit as our template, for cutting it out because it has the screw mounting holes in it there and we want to make sure that we don't cut out those areas, that way we have a place to mount to. So, we're gonna try to make it about the same height as the panel he's got right over here. So we're just gonna lay it out, hold it in place. And this doesn't need to be perfect when you're cutting this out, we can adjust the panel in the slot, once we've cut it out, 'cause it's gonna be a little bit larger than what our actual panel is. So we're just gonna make some rough marks here. 'Cause we actually don't want to cut up in this top area, we want to cut more here. So, what we'll end up doing is we'll take a straight edge and we'll connect these together all at the end here, so that way we ensure we're not cutting out this top area. Now, our customer had already placed a switch there, so we could use this opening to put our saw into, to cut it out, but I find it just the easiest. And especially if you don't have any holes there, to drill out each corner that way, when you're making cuts too, you could make some, you know, a slit up to the corner and then another one and in sections over it to come out, which makes it a lot easier to cut, than one giant piece. So we're just going to take a drill bit that we know is large enough for the blade of our jigsaw to fit through. We're gonna put it up in the corner. And we're just gonna drill out each corner, just like that. So we've got all those holes drilled, we can use our jigsaw to cut it out. You do also want to just double check behind it. I checked beforehand before drilling the holes and pulling the switch out, but there is a lot of wires back there and I pushed all those as far away as possible. So that way we don't accidentally hit it with our jigsaw. I just want to make sure that it fits, your cuts don't need to be perfect because your panel is gonna cover up any of those imperfections. The big thing is that you have all of your mounting holes, able to drill into place and it looks like our panel seems to fit pretty good. You want to also check level. If it's not quite level, then you may need to, take out just a little bit more material so you can get the correct orientation that you want it in. So, at this point you got a couple of options, you could run all your wires and hook everything up for it or you can go in and get it mounted up. I like to mount it up first, so that way I know it's gonna be in the position I want it to be in. Then I can round up my wires and just take the screws out and hook it up as needed 'cause there's a lot of switches here and you're likely not gonna use all these right at the beginning, probably gonna use a couple and then have a few reserved for additional accessories in the future. So what we're going to do is take our gasket, put our gasket into place, we're gonna start with a single screw. I'm gonna kinda push it through just a little bit. We're going to set our panel into place and we're gonna get it relatively level and then we're going to run it in. These are the screws that came included with our kit. Make sure you get that gasket nice and straight. So, we've got that one run in. I went ahead and loosened it just a little bit. So that way we can, line this up 'cause you can see, we have just a little bit of movement here, which allows us to make it nice and level with our other. components and stuff that we've got there. It is kind of a little bit of a pain 'cause you have to hold the gasket up and line all that up while you're doing this but once you get all of your screws started it will be a lot easier. So, I'm just gonna hold it up until it's level there, running our second one. And from this point on installing the rest of your screws is pretty easy. We just, we're just going to go down and, screw the rest of them in, you'll have four remaining ones and once you got the first two in that pretty much holds it nice and straight for you, So, let's just run the rest in . So, we've got our panel fully mounted up at this point we're ready to start routing wiring for various components as well as powering ground over to this panel, powering grounds is necessary to light up our panel and get our volt meter working and then any accessories, you're just gonna route the power wire from those accessories to this, so you can plug them into the back. So, I'm gonna go ahead and unscrew it now and I'm gonna route our wire from the battery here, our customer already had it routed most of the way for the previous switch. So I just need to kinda gather that together. On your Mantis, you'll find your batteries below your stove just to the left of your circuit panel box here. To get your wires routed over, I highly recommend just going down to an opening in the floor routing it underneath the trailer, and then going back up, because the compartment where we had mounted ours, there was already electrical wires that we're routed there from the factory, from Mantis. So, that means there's already a hole there too so we don't have to do any modifications, just poke that wire into those existing holes. So we've got our wires ran over that we need, we've got power here. We've got ground here. And this is the accessory that was hooked up to the switch that was here for some heating pads that are located on the water tanks down below. So I just put spade terminals on those. That's gonna make it a lot easier to add more circuits to this in the future, 'cause then you can just slide it out and then you could disconnect it really easily, 'cause the leads that come off of the actual switch box here, aren't very long. So it'd be really nice to be able to just disconnect it and then work in this area and just reconnect all your things. So we're going to take male spade terminals and put them on our switch side. And the reason why I chose with the male terminals over on this side is 'cause these ones aren't sheathed. So once we disconnect this, this wire is no longer gonna be hot, 'cause the hot wire is on this side and this one's fully sheathed. So that way it can't short on anything here. Went ahead and put another spade terminal on the ground wire as well. If you need any spade terminals, such as the male or female ones that we're using here, you can get those here at etrailer. So you can add those to your cart when you get your switch panel. And, this is it, we just need to hook up power and ground, 'cause if you look at this is parallel to each one, we've got ground parallel to each of our circuit breakers and then our power here is also parallel to each of the circuit breakers and the switches. So now we can just hook up our panel. We're gonna take our ground wire here and we're gonna plug it in to the ground wire on our panel. And we're gonna take our positive wire and connect these two together. And our accessory wire we can plug in. to our circuit breaker. We're gonna be using the 15 amp breaker for this accessory due to the amount of current that it draws. And we can see here, we're getting our battery voltage readings. And when we turn on our switch, the switch lights up and it should be sending power out to our heater. We can go ahead and test it, we've got our test light right here. So, if we poke down in there. You can see we've got power if we are back probing into there, that means we've got power going down and our heaters should be heating up our tanks right now. And now with our panel back in place we're ready to enjoy, easy access to any of our accessories as well as a great layout right here in the front, as soon as we open the door, we can know the charge of our batteries and how much, when we turn on our accessories is going to drop the voltage on our batteries. This is a really good tool as well to just check the condition of your batteries 'cause if you turn on a load and you know how much amps that batteries, or how much amps that load is and your voltage drops a lot more than you would expect for that amount of load, you can tell that your batteries are likely getting weaker. And that completes our look at Bulldog Winches Voltmeter and switch panel on our 2020 TAXA Mantis..