Anderson Plugs are a great way to connect a 12 volt power feed from your car to your caravan or trailer. They can also be used as a connection point between a caravans ‘house’ battery and a portable solar panel. The 2 most common colors of anderson plug are grey and red but they do come in a range of colours. 

When connecting an anderson plug between 2 objects, they need to marry up with the same color e.g. red to red. You won’t be able to fit a red caravan anderson plug into a grey car anderson plug.

The most common size anderson plug that you will see on a tow vehicle and caravan is a 50 amp grey plug, but you can get anderson plugs that can support up to a 350-amp. The bigger the current, the bigger the anderson plug you need.

The anderson plug is designed to handle a high continuous electrical load and this makes it ideal to use in charging circuits. The most common need where we install anderson plugs is to charge the auxiliary battery in a caravan or camper trailer while driving.

One anderson plug is fitted to the rear of the tow vehicle and is connected to the vehicles battery through battery cable and protection points such as a fusible link, circuit breaker or Smart Battery Isolator (SBI). This is the ideal alternative to running a charge feed through your 12-pin plug. When you have too much current charging through a 12-pin plug it can cause the pins to melt as they’re not large enough (30 Amps) to handle the current from most modern alternators. 

Using an anderson plug means you can safely pass more electrical charge through to your caravan’s battery charge system, keeping the caravan batteries charged up while you travel to your next destination.

For all you anderson plug needs contact the BOLD Team by calling (02) 8544-8114 or send us a message. We’re here to help.