Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2000 Chevy Silverado Part 3

Installation of a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2000 Chevy Silverado Part 3

And we can just tuck that out of our way and maybe zip-tie it later. The next part we have to do is run our power wires to the brake controller. The easiest way to do it, honestly, is to go straight to the battery. You do not have to worry about any unnecessary connections. That being said, battery terminals do corrode over time. That could end up losing the connection due to corrosion that way. That being said that batteries do corrode which can lead to problems connecting to the brake controller, another way, that is not recommended by the manufacturer but it could be done technically, you could come off of this post here which is supplied by a 30 amp fuse. And then what you could do is come off here, go to your 20 amp reset breaker, so there is still a fuse with the right amperage, and make your connections here for the positive. And you could run your connection all of the way up to, say like this battery here, has a connection to the frame or to the body. You could probably make your connection there. Because, sometimes you run into a situation where the connections are already corroded up and it is probably not in the best interest to go ahead and take them apart again and redo them because you might have a bigger headache that you are not prepared to deal with. You could probably do it that way. In this case, I think we will go ahead and use this battery here. This truck actually has two batteries set up. 1:09

We will go ahead and use this one. This one looks like it is in relative decent condition. There are a variety of ways that you can connect to this. You can simply take the wire and big ring terminal and just install it between the post and with like this ground wire right here. There is also little brass tabs that you can loosen, do the same thing and reinstall too. These work well. However, you want to pay attention to them, that sometimes the little terminals that slip on here may come loose over time. So if you get intermittent problems, maybe the one of first things you want to check for corrosion inside of here too. 1:39

When you do your electrical, you may want to go ahead and disconnect the ground first. That way, when you work on the positive side and accidentally hit the frame, you will not get a spark or short out anything. And we will just text our connections real fast. Next we will go ahead and mount our circuit breaker. It is always a good idea to mount it as close as possible as you can to the power supply. There is not much room to work with here, so we will probably have to go back up around here somewhere. Now it is just a simple matter of running our wire, our ground wire to the cab and then we will make a jumper from the positive terminal to the side labeled battery on the circuit breaker and then from the other post back down to the brake controller. Make sure that that is good and tight and then we will just run that along the side here and run it back through the fire wall. Go ahead and run our wire back through. Now we are doing this one at a time basically. The reason is, make sure you connect your ground wire to your ground wire on your brake controller. If you accidentally run these two together by accident, it will instantly fry the brake controller and, basically, you just bought yourself a brick. Okay, that is one worry out of the way. 3:42

Let us go back and run our power lead, our 12 volts, to the black wire. We will run this from the battery to the one that is labeled battery. And we are going to leave this other end loose for now. This end will stay loose. We will make this our final connection when we are done. We do not want to go ahead and scrap against the frame or anything like that and cause a short. We are just going to leave that alone. And then we will make our jumper from here to underneath the dash. Okay, while we are here, we will go ahead and tighten these lugs down and zip-tie the wires secure. Again, we still want to leave this one loose. We will do that as our last connection. Alright, and let us make our connection underneath the dash. Alright, let us make our connection to the battery and we will test our brake controller, make sure it is working. 5:17

Alright, let us go and do our testing. Just verify our connections. Let us make sure we have 12 volts coming in. Okay, and we will double check our brake wire signal. Okay, we have that good. So now what we will do is we will test the blue wire and this brake controller actually sends out a trace current to make sure there is a connection to the trailer. This test light will do that, not a multi-meter but a test light. It has to have a light bulb to give it a load. And we will connect it up and see what we get. We have the green light, we will go ahead and spin up the power all of the way up. And we will hit the manual override. We have power and we will double check with the brake signal. We have pulses. Alright, the last thing you do is just clean up our wires here, going out to the engine compartment, and we are set. And there you have it for part number 39523 from Tekonsha, the Powertrac brake controller and we installed that on a 2000 Chevrolet Pickup Dual Body style.