Replacement Breakaway Switch for Bright Way Trailer Breakaway Kits

Video Transcript for Replacement Breakaway Switch for Bright Way Trailer Breakaway Kits: The Breakdown

Hi there trailer owners. Today we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to either add or replace your breakaway switch with one here from Bright Way Group. It's just gonna be your traditional breakaway switch. You can use it either as a replacement for a damaged switch that you've got out there or you can use it to add one to a trailer that didn't have one already. This particular trailer here is my own personal trailer, I had no brakes on it whatsoever so we added those. And to ensure that we've got the maximum amount of safety here, we put a breakaway switch on the front.

So that way in the rare event of a catastrophic disconnect, we are gonna be as protected as we can be. With our switch, we do get our lead here that does come pre-installed onto the switch head there for the pin. You do get about four foot of lead there, so that's plenty of lead. You can kind of just see here compared to my safety chains. I'll have plenty of length to get up to my trailer, still a little bit extra there.

So it's nice that you've got plenty of length there. So that gives you a little bit of flexibility on where you wanna mount it. Whether you're wanting to mount it under on the underside, on top, on the side, wherever. That's all up to you. Pretty much everything you would expect from a breakaway switch.

It's pretty common on its size. There are smaller breakaway switches out there but me personally, I prefer this traditional size. It just feels nice and quality built. Some of the smaller ones feel a little bit cheaper to me. I like having the large area here at the back for my attachment.

Now you will have to provide your own hardware. And if you are gonna use any kind of junction box, you'll have to provide your own ring terminals. But it is just our standard to wire just like every other breakaway switch. So if you wanna follow along with us, we'll show you how to get this mounted up and wired into your trailer. We'll begin our installation here at the front of the trailer. We'll need to mount up our breakaway switch. Now, there's a few reasons why you would be wanting to install one of these. It could be because your old breakaway switch. You came out there and did the test by pulling the pin and it didn't activate your brakes. If that is the case, before you replace the switch there's a couple of things you should check first. You should charge up your battery, make sure your battery's topped off. Cause if your battery's weak it may not activate the brakes. And then do a quick visual check on your wiring to make sure that there's no breaks from there to the back. If you don't see anything like that going on, if there's no breaks and your battery's charged up and it still doesn't work, there's a good chance that the contacts are just worn out in your switch and no longer activating anymore. Cause these do sit out in the elements, so it's not uncommon for corrosion and stuff like that to occur on the inside of these after several of years of sitting outside. Now on our particular trailer here, this is my personal trailer and it didn't have trailer breaks on it. We just added them. So to make sure that we stay as safe as we can be when towing, we're gonna add a breakaway switch here to the front. There's a battery on this trailer that we can hook to to activate the switch in the event of a catastrophic disconnect. So we're gonna start by mounting it there. Normally you would just replace where your old switch was. Just take the old one off and put it in the same location. But since my trailer didn't have any brakes, we get to choose where we want to put it. Ideally, you want to put it in a location where, when the pin here is pulled in the event of a catastrophic disconnect, that it can pull the pin straight outward. Cause if you're pulling at an angle or anything like that, that could actually cause it to just break the plastic end off there and not pull the pin, defeating its purpose. But if you have a nice, straight pull like we see here, and it does take a little bit of force, It will come out of there. But again, you saw how much force it takes from doing a straight pull. So if you we're pulling at a side angle it would just never pull that out of there, it would break the end of it off of there. So that's one of the most important things, is making sure that we are gonna be able to have a good pull. So we're gonna put ours in this location here. That way it's gonna be close enough to the front that I know I'm gonna have enough cable length. We have about four foot of cable here but enough to be able to kind of go with our safety chains and be able to hook to the back of my truck. And then I also wanted to put it in a close enough location that my wiring's going to be able to reach where we're going to install it. Now you'll notice here that you've got two wires coming out of the back of your breakaway switch. One of them is for the trailer brakes, it'll connect to the same wire that your brakes are connected to and the other one connects to power. So that way, when the pin pulls, it sends power directly to the brakes to activate them. So you would wanna be near those items. I've got a junction box right here. We're gonna be installing it in, but if you didn't have a junction box or something you would wanna make sure you're close enough to your battery to be able to hook up to that battery power. So we're gonna mount ours here. You do not get any mounting hardware included with your breakaway switch so you will have to provide your own. So we're just gonna use a self-tapping screw and just run it right in the top. I'm going to use a little, like a fender washer there to give me additional surface area on pulling my switch down, holding it in place. We're gonna use a 10 millimeter socket to run this in. I was double checking, make sure there's nothing on the other side of that area when you're installing it. You don't wanna run your screw into anything. And then I always like to make it snug but not overly tight. I want it to be able to kind of do just a little bit like that there. Ah you see it can do just a little bit of pivot. So this is where we're gonna be installing our component here. You can get these junction boxes here at E trailer. I really like them, it helps keep all your wiring organized. If you're gonna be adding accessories in the future, it makes things really easy to do so. And then just for future repairs and stuff, it's also really nice. It helps me keep, again, keep everything organized and I can make attachments really easily here. So we're gonna be adding our wire in through this location here. So, potentially slide that outta the way there. We're gonna loosen up both of the screws there in our junction box, just so we can pass our wires in. And then we're gonna be hooking it to the blue post there. Cause that's the blue wire on our seven way which is also our brake controller output wire. That's gonna activate our brake. So our blue wire from our break away switch will go there. And then our black wire, we're gonna hook to our battery power and on our trailer that's gonna be the black stud over here. It does have red wires going to it but that is, the, this is all of our battery power over here. So I went ahead and loosened that up some so that way I can get my wires passed through there. So now we'll just bring our wiring around. Slide it in to our junction box here. And I'm gonna leave a little bit of extra breakaway switch wire here just to, for the event for the future. Something you may or may not need it. So I'm just kind of leaving a little bit of excess there just for future use potentially. And then we'll run it in. Now, the rest of this, we are gonna trim the length. We don't need to have all this excess wire here. So we know the black wire's gonna go over here to this black switch. I mean to the black stud there, that's where our battery power is so we'll trim it off there. And then our blue wire's gonna go to the blue stud here. Where our brake output wire is to activate the brakes. So we'll trim that off there. So next we're gonna strip back both of these wires so we can make our connections. Now, if you don't have a junction box like this you could just take the blue wire or your, whichever wire is your brake activation wire. The one that's the output from your brake controller. Typically blue is the color you could just cut that and use butt connectors to attach it in there. I'd recommend heat shrink butt connectors if you we're gonna do it that way. But if you got a junction box like this then I recommend using small ring terminals. They don't come included with your breakaway switch but you can get those here at E trailer. So we're just stripping that back, grabbing our small ring terminal there. That'll fit over our wire and then you get attached to the stud there. Go ahead and crimp that down. And then we'll make our connection onto the stud. If you're using one of these boxes, the stud nuts are typically an eight millimeter in size. So we can take that off of there. Usually after the nut in most of these setups, you'll have a washer. So try to take your washer off there as well. Sometimes I'll actually use the ring terminal to help me slide the washer on and off of there. Fixing that a little bit better than my fingers do. And then we're actually gonna maybe go up something like that with this wire, slide your washer back in place over top of your ring terminal and reinstall your nut. So again, just kind of reiterating of what we're doing here. We are attaching the blue wire on our breakaway switch which is a brake activation wire on our trailer. That's also the same as the output from your brake controller. Okay. Now our black wire, this just needs to hook to a power source, so connect to your battery. If you don't have a battery in your trailer we do offer kit CRD trailer that come with small breakaway switch batteries to activate your brakes. I got a winch on this trailer so I got a pretty big battery on here already. So I'm just gonna utilize the winch battery and we're gonna attach it over there. So I'll strip it back, add a ring terminal. And just like the blue wire, we'll remove that nut and washer, slide our ring terminal on there and secure it down. Now you may want to disconnect the negative side on your battery before making this connection. Cause if you take this off here, this is a live wire on here, hooked directly to the battery so keep that in mind. Cause what is very nearby this black stud here is the white stud, which is the ground for our setup. So they are fairly close to one another. Alright, so we got our ring terminal on there. We'll now make our connection to our positive. You can then slide your ring terminal on, reinstall your washer and your nut. If you notice, I kept my hand pretty much in, on the end of that stud shaft the entire time. And that was because I did not disconnect my battery. So by keeping my finger there in place, it prevented any of my live wires from being able to pop off of that stud and contacting the ground, a grounded component. Alright. But yeah, we got those all in there. That all looks pretty good. Now we just need to tighten it down. Alright, our connections are made in there. At this point we really just need to take our cover, reinstall it. And then we can test out the operation of our breakaway switch. I do have the driver's side of the trailer jacked up with the wheel off the ground. So that way we can spin it and verify that our switch is working. So now we'll test everything out. I've got this side of the trailer jacked up. You can see we just put brand new brakes on it. I went ahead and installed one wheel so we can spin this wheel. And then I'm gonna go pull the breakaway switch and it should activate the brakes and stop that wheel from spinning. Our pin is pulled and our wheel has stopped. I'm gonna come back here and just double check it and make sure I can't spin it. There you can see the pin in my hand, we are locked in. I'm gonna go now reinsert the pin that should deactivate the brakes. When I reinsert the pin, I could hear it click. So it sounded like it deactivated there and everything is deactivated. So it looks like everything's working properly with our breakaway switch. We can go ahead and get the wheels back on this side and everything. We mainly just had it off for just checking our work, making sure that the breakaway switch is gonna actually stop our brakes. And that completes our look in installation of Bright Way Group's breakaway switch..