Dead battery on toad with Unified Tow Brake
 

I've been towing a 2010 Scion xD (manual) with a US Gear Unified Tow Brake (TV-1000K) since April of 2011 with no problems until about two months ago, when I started experiencing a dead battery on the toad after 8 hours of towing. The Scion has an after market Pioneer Radio-Bluetooth-Nav System that cannot be powered off, but since I never had the battery problem for the first 12-14 months of use, I figure the radio is not the culprit. The battery on the toad checks out as "OK", so I suspect the power from the motor home to the toad may be where the problem is. Has anyone else had this problem? What's the fix?

If you have properly installed the US-gear then there are two wires, Red and Blue as I recall. on the brake harness.

The blue wire is everything to do with the brakes, both sense and control, the voltage on that line is what determines if the brakes engage, Nearly 12 volts (11.x) is provided by the controller in the towed and sensed by the "remote" in the motor home. As the motor home decelerates with the brakes on the reomte draws current, this lowering of courrent causes the controll unit in the car to engage brakes.

The RED wire has a 20 amp breaker hooked to the RV chassis battery and a 40 amp breaker hooked to the Towed's battery.

You have a red-wire problem or a bad breaker.

Thanks, wa8yxm! I'll check the red wire and breakers this afternoon.

Be sure the "red wire" is connected directly to the house batteries and not thru the ignition sw. Ours originally went to the 12v pin on the 7 pin plug. On a Monaco, that was a switched voltage from the ignition. Sometime the toad battery was dead - sometime not. After a direct battery connaction was made (thru fuses) there's not been a problem.