Video Transcript for What to Know About the Peterson Trailer Backup Light

Today we'll be taking a look at the Petersen trailer backup light. This is going to be an incandescent, rectangular style light with a clear lens to help you get your trailer backed up into a parking space or just to illuminate the area behind you. It's going to be a surface mount lights. That basically means that our ground connection is made by this metal plate making contact with our trailer or the screws making contact. Now these screws come with it and that's to attach the lens to the light housing. As far as mounting hardware, you'd use these four holes along the perimeter, but it does not come with any hardware for that, so you will have to pick up something on your own, whether that's nuts and bolts or some type of other self-tapping screw.

If we loosen the two screws holding the lens in place, we'll be able to get a look at the inside there. If the bulb ever burns out, this is how you would need to replace it.So we can just thread those two screws out and then we can see the inside. So we'll have our bulb there. You just twist and pull that out, maybe an eighth of a turn. There's just a little catch there to keep that in place.

And then put our lens back over, line it up there inside the housing and then thread this back down. You might notice this little grommet I have here. That also comes with the light and that provides a little bit of protection for the back of the light against your trailer. It's kind of a fiber composite material, sort of a thick paper almost. Kind of feels like very heavy duty construction paper, so it's not going to provide any kind of water resistance I wouldn't think.

But it does give a little bit of shock absorption for the back of your light. Just kind of gives it a little bit of protection there.If you we're to put it on the inside, it sort of fits, but then that makes it so the screws won't attach down to that plate. It doesn't have enough length to get a bite on that plate. So it does need to be on the outside of the light like this. It's compatible with 12 volt DC systems.

We just have our single wire to actually connect, and I'm going to hook this up to my power source here so you can get an idea of how bright it's going to be. So I'm just running my power to that wire and then my ground to one of those screws. And you can see as soon as I make contact with that, the light comes on. So if those screws make contact with your trailer, that creates the ground, even if the plate itself doesn't make contact. Turn out the light in the studio, so you can get a better idea of how it will look in a low light situation. So pretty bright light. Got that about two feet above the table there. Still pretty bright.It's kind of a yellowish light. The bulb type inside there is a 1141 or 1-1-4-1. Turn my power off and let's go over some measurements. Also going to set this grommet aside. So lengthwise, you're looking at about four . Flip this over. Four and nine sixteenths inches or just over four and a half inches there. Going the other way, width is about two and five eighths or just over two and a half inches. The height is about one and three quarters. The distance from the mounting holes on that back plate, center to center, long ways, it's about three and a half inches. So those two bottom holes. inaudible 00:04:12 you can see a little bit better. And then going the other way, it's about one and a half.Overall pretty simple light to install. It's going to provide a nice bright light. That bulb does provide 28 watts of power, and this is going to be an exact replacement for the Optronics number BU31CB and the Grote 62291. Comes with a one year limited warranty from Peterson and it is made in the USA. That's going to do it for our look at the Peterson trailer backup light.