Trailer Wiring Harness Installation - 2010 Chevrolet Equinox

Installation of a Wiring Harness for a Trailer on a 2010 Chevrolet Equinox

Today on this 2010 Chevrolet Equinox we are going to be installing Cequent wiring harness part number 118494. We are going to start off at the rear of the Equinox and locate the ports that the wiring harness is going to plug into. These ports are located directly behind the tail light assemblies on both the driver and passenger side. The first thing we need to do is remove both the driver and passenger side tail lights. To do that you can see we have got two covered connectors on the inboard side. We just want to pry off the lid and that is going to reveal a Phillips head screw. With those two removed we can gently rock the tail light back and forth to release the outboard clips of the tail light. With the tail light removed you can see our connection port is located directly on the back side of the tail light. We just want to depress the button on the connector and that is going to allow us to separate the two pieces. For the time being we just set the tail light off to the side. 00:53

Starting over on the driver side I am going to start plugging my harness in. You will notice that our harness does have two connectors. One for the driver and one for the passenger side. What you want for the driver side is the one with the yellow and brown wires on it. We are going to plug this in line between the vehicle and the tail light. You will also notice on this connector that we have a ground wire. We do need to secure that to the metal surface on the back side. We are going to do that using the self tapping screw that is provided with our installation kit. Then we want to take the remaining section of our wiring harness, the passenger side connector, the 4-pole end, and the modulite box and feed those through the opening in between the bumper and the body. With those routed through we can reinstall our driver side tail light assembly. 01:44

Up underneath the vehicle you can see our modulite box, our passenger side connector, and our 4-pole. Basically what we need to do is get the 4-pole and the passenger side connector across and into position. When doing this we want to be extremely careful because you can see we have got our exhaust right here not only on the driver side but on the passenger side as well. We do not want to the wires touching that at all. What I am going to do is use these fascia straps to help hold the wire up and out of the way but I am also going to attempt to pinch the wire back behind the bumper in the styrofoam and probably use a couple of clamps to merge it to the top side here. The main goal is to keep it away from the exhaust. Also I am going to attach a long lead of black wire to the red wire on the modulite box. We just want to strip back a little bit of the jacketing on the red wire and apply the provided butt connector. Again we will just take the large lead of black wire, strip off one of the ends of it as well, and crimp that. Take some electrical tape and wrap up that connection. Then before I route the wires across I am going to adhere my modulite box. Provided with the wiring harness is an alcohol prep pad that we can use to clean off the surface. Then peal back the double sided tape on the back of the modulite box and adhere it. Now I am going to start the process of routing the wires across. 03:01

I want to show you a trick to help guide the passenger side connector up between the body in the bumper over to the passenger side tail light. What I am going to do is take a light gauge piece of wire and feed it down between the opening first and then just secure it to the wires on the passenger side. Then when I proceed underneath the vehicle I could just tape it to that piece of wire and use that to pull it up into place. I do want to note that with that mounting position of the modulite box you are going to find this lead of green wire is going to be pretty tight. You might not want to fully pull it up into position. We are going to have to insure that our green wire is pushed up and behind the styrofoam of the bumper. Then back up to the back side of the passenger side tail light housing, remove the wire where the lead for the passenger side connector is. It is pretty tight so you do want to make sure that you make your connections first and then you can go back underneath and manipulate the wires as you need to to avoid the exhaust. We will continue back underneath the vehicle and start routing our wire up to the battery. When routing the wire you just want to avoid any possible pinch points or hot spots that could damage the wire. 04:18

Now that we are up to the engine compartment, what I did previously like we did back at the tail light assembly is to use a piece of black gauge wire and I fed it from the engine compartment down underneath the vehicle so I can use it as a pull wire to make it easier to get my black wire up to the battery. Up underneath the hood compartment you can see our black wire that we routed up from underneath the vehicle. We are going to route it over to the battery where we are going to connect to the positive terminal. You will notice that we will need to remove this piece here to gain access to the positive post of the battery. To do that we just need to slide the cover off. With the cover removed you just need to remove this single screw here at the inboard side. Take and slide the unit towards the driver side of the vehicle. Then we just need to remove the nut off the positive terminal and next we are going to take our fuse holder provided with our wiring kit. What we want to do is cut it in half and strip back some jacketing on both ends. To the one end we are going to add a ring terminal which is going to connect directly to the positive terminal and to the other end we are going to apply a butt connector which is going to connect to our 12 gauge black wire. I am going to assemble the fuse holders to the positive post first. We just take the lead of black wire and you can see we have got more than we need so we can cut that to length, strip off some jacketing, and add it to the other side of the butt connector. Again I want to add some electrical tape to that connection and then finally add the fuse to the fuse holder. From there our installation is complete. We just want to make sure we reassemble everything we uninstalled and tie up any loose wires we may have left over using the provided cable ties. That will conclude the installation of wiring harness part number 118494 on a 2010 Chevrolet Equinox.