Tekonsha Push To Test Breakaway Kit with Charger Review

Review of the Push To Test Breakaway Kit with Charger from Tekonsha

We are going to install part number 50-85-313 from Tekonsha, this is Tekonshas push to test breakaway kit with the premium integrated charger. We will show you what comes with the kit. This is basically the battery box right here and it gets installed onto the side of the frame by these two tabs right here, there is one on each side. It is very easy to install, it only has three wires to hook up. Then we have the actual breakaway switch itself which comes with the kit and is just two wires to hook up to. Very easy to install. When you install the box you want to make sure that you keep it in a somewhat protected area and if you can not put it on the outside it is better to put it on the inside wherever it is easiest to get to in service. What we will do is clamp it in place here and mark and drill out our holes. Once you have it clamped the way you want it we will just mark out our holes and then for the base we will use some self-tapping screws to hold everything together. 00:53

Just mark the holes and then take it off and we will do the actual drilling. We will repeat that for the remaining holes that we need to drill out. I have got the holes drilled lets mount the box. The next thing we will do is mount our breakaway switch itself and mount it a little overlapped just like that. The reason why you want to leave it is because we have an edge right here to have it overlap, the reason being is that we do not want to have the plunger here caught between here and the switch itself and having it break the handle and it not coming all the way out. So it pulls out as a clean shot. We will start with the wiring connections. We are going to start with the switch itself. The switch will get power from the breakaway battery which will come in through one wire and out the other to the brake line when the switch is pulled. It does not matter which wire goes to the blue wire, the switch does not care, so we will make our first connection using this black wire and we are going to connect to our blue brake wire. 02:01

There is a variety of different ways that you can make these connections and we are going to use a simple quick splice that just makes it easy to see what is going on. That is done, lets put that out of our way and now we will work on our next wire. This wire is what gets power from the breakaway kit and that is going to connect up to the blue output wire from the kit from the breakaway battery itself. Sneak that around. The next thing I think we will deal with will be the white wire and then we will connect and this will go straight to ground so this is going to go straight to the frame itself. That will work just fine. The next wire we will deal with is the black wire and this is part of the charging circuit so we are going to run this wire and we are going to extend it with another black wire up to the 7-pole connector so it can connect up to the battery feed. We will go run this up through our loom up to the 7-pole wire harness. While we are at it when we run the wire up to the 7-pole we will take off the old loom and put the new stuff on. We have got our black wire ran up to our 7-pole, we will put a ring terminal on it, and then we will hook it up to the 7-pole and then we will hook it up to the one labeled black. At this point we will reassemble the 7-pole. Now we are done with our connections up here, lets put the new loom into place. I went ahead and extended the loom to the wires that we added to the harness too. Now lets check the operation of the breakaway system itself. Push the green button and it will tell you the status of the battery. Hold it down, right now it says that it needs to recharge so we will hook up to our tow vehicle and then we should see the yellow light come on where it says charging. I have got the key on the on position in the vehicle and you can see how the yellow LED came on. It is telling us that it is charging the battery inside now. Over time once the battery is fully charged the green LED will turn on. When the time comes that the battery needs replacing, all you have to do is push back the lid, there is a little zip tie that holds everything together. Pop the lid open, just pull back the lid, and you can see it is a conventional battery that can be easily replaced. The lid has a latch that goes on to it but you can secure it with a zip tie also. With that, that will finish our review of part number 50-85-313 from Tekonsha.