Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2008 Toyota Tacoma

Installation of a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2008 Toyota Tacoma

Today on this 2008 Toyota Tacoma pick up we will be installing Prodigy brake controller part number 90185 and we will also be using the brake control wiring kit part number ETBC7. We are going to start here at the rear of the vehicle and mount our 7-pole first. As you can see our vehicle here already has an existing 4-pole that we are going to be plugging our 7-pole adapter into. So in preparation I want to find a spot to go ahead and mount our 7-pole bracket to. On this Tacoma there is not a whole lot to work with. We typically like to mount it here on the back side of the bumper. Mounting at that angle would be kind of obnoxious. So I am actually going to be using part number 118136 which is a long bracket that will attach to the trailer hitch here with the use of a hose clamp. And then we can just mount our 7-pole bracket on like so.

Before I install my 7-pole into the bracket here I am going to go ahead and take the two foot of wire loom and go ahead and feed it over the top of the wires. Next we are going to take our large bundle of double bounded wire here. We are going to go ahead and cut that little bit of jacketing. You will have a white and black wire inside of there. We are going to connect the black wire to the existing black wire here on the 7-pole. Then we will take the white wire and connect it to the blue wire here on the 7-pole. Just go ahead and tape those up. Next we will go ahead and plug our 4-poles together. I am going to go ahead and add a little bit of dielectric grease to the 4-pole and I am also going to add a little bit of tape around that connection as well.

And then we will come down through the wiring here. You can see we have got our white and our purple wires. The white wire you can see has a ring terminal on it. That is our ground wire. We are going to need to secure that to the frame of the vehicle. The purple wire is for our reverse lead. Since we are not going to be using it I am just going to tape it off to the side here. Since this ring terminal on the ground wire is fairly large I am actually going to cut that one off and put a smaller one on there and just use a self tapping screw to mount it to the frame. Then we just want to take and secure up the loose wires that we have here using the wire ties that are provided with our ETBC7 kit. We are going to take our long lead of double bounded wire and go ahead and route it up to under the hood compartment. When routing the wire you want to make sure that you avoid any possible pinch points or hot spots that could damage our wire. We are up here in the engine compartment now with our wire routed up here. At this point we are going to mount up our circuit breakers. This Tacoma has a nice spot right here on top of the fender well. Take and split the two wires that are inside our jacketing here. The white wire is going to be routed to our brake controller. The black wire is going to connect to the positive side of the battery via the 40 amp circuit breaker. 03:39

And then to the other end of the black wire here I am just going to add one of the ring terminals that is provided with our installation kit. Okay, we are just going to leave that there for the time being. We will connect that last. Okay if you look right behind here, you can see there is a small black plug and that is a knock out that goes actually inside the cab. So we can go ahead and pull that plug out and use that hole as a pass through for our wires. Typically we like to mount the brake controller over here on the right side of the steering column. As you can see we have got a lot of angle here. So we are going to go ahead and go over here to the left hand side just below the compartment here there is a nice flat surface that will be perfect for our mounting. So we are going to go ahead and do that now. The red wire will be going to the brake switch and we are looking to connect the to the cold side of the brake switch which would be the wire that gets hot when we press the brake pedal. The blue wire here is going to connect to our white wire that we routed from the back of the vehicle. The black is the hot and white is the ground. And these two wires we are going to route through the grommet that we found earlier and mount it directly to the battery. What I am using is an extra piece of the double bounded wire and I am going to connect it to our black and white here on our harness. I will be using the butt connectors which were provided with the Prodigy itself. I am just going to cut down the white wire because I have got plenty of extra lead and then I will take one of the butt connectors that was provided with our ETBC7 and connect it with our blue wire. And I am just going to go ahead and tape those connections up. And now I am going to go find our brake switch. To find the brake switch we are just going to trace up from the brake pedal and if you look right here at the back side you can see the brake switch there. What we are going to do is cut back the jacketing here a little bit to gain access to the wires.

Okay and then I am just going to take my probe tester here and then I am just going to prick the wires until I figure out which one gets hot when I press the brake pedal. And it looks like the blue wire there is the one that we are looking for. I am going to take a quick splice and we will just slide it over the blue wire there. We will take the red wire from our harness and slide it into the other side of the quick splice. And then we will take a pair of pliers and crimp down the metal tab there in the middle and that will make our connection for us. And then I also at this point want to go ahead and feed the two wires the hot and the ground that are going in to the battery. You can go ahead and feed those through the hole that we had found earlier. All right and we just want to go ahead and zip tie the wires up and I am going to go ahead and leave them plugged in loose for the time being so we can make our connections and then we will plug it back in to the Prodigy. And then we will go back out to the engine compartment and connect the two wires from the brake controller. Back in the engine compartment we have got a double bonded that we have routed from the brake controller. We need to hook the black wire to the 30 amp circuit breaker. And to each end of the wires here we want to add a ring terminal from our ETBC7. All right now we are just going to go ahead and connect them to the battery. We just want to secure any loose wires that we may have and we will go back inside the cab and connect the plug to the back of the Prodigy and our installation will be completed. And you can see instantly once we plug in to the Prodigy that we are getting a flashing “N C” which stands for no connection. When we hook the trailer up to it we see that the brake controller shows a “C” now and with that that will conclude the installation of Prodigy part number 90185 and wiring kit ETBC7.