etrailer | The Low-Down on the Trailer License Plate Light with Housing and Mounting Bracket

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Hey, everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be checking out and showing you how to install the Optronics trailer license plate light. A license plate light is one of those small things that you need to stay legal when you're driving at nighttime and this one will make a great replacement, or even in addition to your trailer. In this case, on an enclosed trailer, being that it's a work trailer, these things take a beating. Someone might come around and end up breaking the existing one. That's exactly what happened on our neighbor's trailer here today.
The existing one, something caught it, broke it, and that's just kind of what it is there, really no other way around it, but like I said, this'll work out real well for 'em and keep 'em legal. This particular one, the housing is made from a plastic material. They make some metal ones that we looked into, but in our case, this was a perfect matchup with the existing one and so that's why we decided to use this one. We wouldn't have to modify anything, essentially, just directly replace it and sometimes that's the way to go, honestly, but if yours is a little bit different, you can always check out those metal ones. Might hold up a little bit longer.
To figure out if this is gonna work for your particular application, I'll just give you a few measurements. So the overall width is gonna be four inches. From the mounting hole to the mounting hole, and it's gonna be 3 7/16 an inch. The light is gonna be an inch and 9/16 wide I guess you could say this way. And as far as the height, it's gonna be 2 5/8 of an inch tall, so pretty standard in terms of these, but you know, check your trailer out to make sure that this'll work out for ya.
And something that I do like behind here, there's quite a big opening. It worked out real well for us so why don't we check out the back of our light. If you take a look at the back of the light, couple things to point out. I do like how it's relatively deep in here, so depending on your trailer set up, if you have a wire poking through, you can always connect it and kind of put the remaining wire inside of there without having to tuck it up into the trailer. So you're gonna have a black wire will be power and then the white one is ground, comes pre-attached with the ring terminal.
Can either attach this to the frame of your trailer or metal portion or if you have a two-wire design you can always hook that up to the existing ground wire. Choice is yours. Being an incandescent, I usually prefer LED lights, but this particular light seemed to fit our trailer the best so that's what we're going with. But this just rotates out so you can change that bulb whenever it goes out, eventually it will, but one thing you could always do when this one does go out, or even right off the bat if you wanted LED, you could always grab a replacement LED like this. So this is a 194 bulb. You actually carry these here too. You always pop that in there and kind of get the same thing, or the same results as a light that comes built as an LED. Just turned off the overhead lights to get a better visual of what this will look like. It does throw the light out really wide, actually, and relatively far, so I just wanted to kind of give you guys a visual there as far as that goes. In terms of getting this installed, everyone's set up will be a little bit different, but for the most part it's gonna be pretty straightforward, not a whole lot to it, so we'll go ahead get started on that and hopefully it'll give you some direction. To begin our installation, we're first gonna remove our old light setup. This one's a two-wire design. I'm just gonna cut both of 'em. The ground, I'll probably just do away with and just ground it to our trailers back here. That'll be easiest, so I'll cut that off and so we're only gonna be worried about this brown power wire here. Strip that insulation back. Give that wire good twist. And then I'm gonna use a heat shrink type butt connector. Just slide that over the bare end of the wire and crimp it down. And we can grab our new light. We'll simply just place power wire into the other end and crimp it down. Being that this is a heat shrink butt connector, the ends will seal up to protect against corrosion and things like that so I'll grab my heat gun and get that done. (heat gun whirring) Since I'm deciding to just use our ring terminal as a ground, you wanna make sure that the surface is clean. We ar