I'm Glad I'm Not An Electrician All The Time...

I spent a couple of days crawling around under both the car and the trailer.  I spent an hour on the phone over the course of a couple of days debating different approaches to wiring the Civic for the trailer and the charger. 

I was directed to find a circuit that was 'only on' when the ignition was keyed.  I didn't even know that there was a fuse box under the hood, but it turns out there are two fuse boxes.  I tested each of the circuits under the hood to see if one of them was 'switchable.'  No dice.  So, I learned that I was going to have to tap into the interior fuse box and drill a hole through the firewall.  I was very anxious about doing that.  So, I decided on another approach.

 I was going to use a fuse tap to avoid having to splice into the actual wiring in the car.  This was a pretty cool device that I had never seen before.  You just insert the pulled fuse with another fuse of the same amperage.  The wire that went out of the tap was your 'hot' wire.  This wire would then go out to the teardrop in order to 'charge' the battery when on the road.  The only problem would be that the 'always on' circuit has the potential to draw down the battery of the tow vehicle when the trailer is connected.

 Here was my solution for getting into the watertight fuse box.  I was going to drill a tiny hole and insert a rubber grommet which would secure the hole and allow the hot wire to pass through.

Here is the wire and the rubber grommet.  This worked pretty well.

I learned that there are at least three different size fuses of the same amperage.  All three of these fuses are 15 amp fuses.  However, only the middle one would fit in the fuse tap so I needed to run to the hardware store and get some extras.

Here is the fuse tap with the two 15 amp fuses in place. I pulled the wire through the grommet and then snapped the fuse box lid into place.  Next I ran 12 gauge wire down past the engine and back along the bottom of the vehicle and out to the hitch.  That was all I could do today