Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2004 Ford F150

Installation of a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2004 Ford F150 with Tow Package

If you are throwing around the idea of installing a brake controller or needed one yesterday this video will show you step by step what is required. Many trucks come with a factory provided brake control wiring harness which is usually tucked into the glove compartment. On this video we will demonstrate how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy brake controller using this OEM harness. Since this truck has the tow package the only hardwiring required is between the factory harness and the controller. If you want to eliminate all hardwiring and make installation even faster you can opt to purchase the Tekonsha custom wiring harness if one is available for your vehicle.

Today we are going to install part number 90185 on a 2004 Ford F-150 pickup truck, and this does have a tow package. We are going to use the actual factory tow package itself. If you notice, here is the plug right here for it that comes with the tow package. And yes, there is an adapter that goes straight from the brake controller to the factory tow package, in case you do have this part and want to use it we will show you how to do that. To begin, I will show you one major difference on here, on the brake controller itself, if you look at the wire harness that comes with it, there are four wires for it. With the factory tow package there are five wires. What is different is this one wire is called the illumination feed. Nobody has ever told me what the reason for its existence is, so all we can do is ignore it since all the functions we need are with the remaining four wires. So when you have this harness, and this applies to a lot of pickup trucks with the factory harness, if you have the illumination feed just fold it back and forget about it.

We will go ahead and make our connections. It is pretty simple, the instructions will tell you what color goes to what, what color is used on the harness for the brake controller. Say for instance, blue is going to be for the brake lead that goes out back and then on the factory harness it will tell you what one does what. It is labeled here to trailer electric brakes. We will just follow that all the way to the wires. We will start with the blue, and there is going to be a break lead, and this is labeled break lead, so we will do that first. And you can do this with wire nuts, quick splices or obviously crimp connections like we are doing here which makes for a sleeker install. Now we will do our black wire, that goes to our twelve volt power supply. And labeled on here, the factory harness, is wire feed from battery, so we will hook up this red to this black. Next we will do our red wire here and red wire goes to our stop light feed so look for that on here. And then our green wire that shows stop lamps will connect up to that, so we will be going from our red to our green. Lastly is our white wire on our brake control harness and that for ground wire. The white wire on the factory harness is labeled ground as well so we will connect those together. Then all we need to do is tape up connections, make it look nice and we will install it on our truck. How we are going to mount our brake controller, instead of traditionally to the dash here which is kind of at a steep angle, there is a nice piece of metal here for a computer port and we will put it right next to that and we will have just enough room to install it and enough steel for this screw here and we will put one in the middle on this side. We should be pretty well set. Now we will clamp it into place and mark out our holes. Next we will use a couple of self tapping screws and go right through that.

Actually, next what we are going to do is go ahead and plug in our wiring into this port and this port is hidden basically right behind this computer port here. It is above it and is pointing out that way, basically it is right above this bracket right here. So we will go ahead and plug this in. Then we will plug it up to our brake controller and then we will go ahead and install the screws that hold it in place. The next step is for you to take care of this excess wiring here, we will bundle it up and zip tie to somewhere safe underneath the dash. One other note is that we left that illumination feed wire open in case a customer wants or needs to use it for anything else. Aside from testing the brake controller, our install is complete. That covers our install of part number 90185, the prodigy brake controller on our 2004 Ford F150 pickup with a factory tow package.