Replacement Charger for Curt Soft Trac I and II Trailer Breakaway Kits

Video Transcript for Curt Soft Trac I and II Trailer Breakaway Kits Replacement Charger Review

Hi there safety-conscious haulers. Today we're going to be taking a look at CURT's Breakaway Switch Battery Charger. We replaced our old charger because it wasn't charging the battery properly. It actually damaged our battery, which resulted in battery replacement. We didn't want to hook up the old charger to our new battery and just result with the same things, so we put a new charger on here and the purpose of the charger is to properly charge this battery. It limits the amount of current going to it so we don't overcharge the battery, which ensures a longer lasting life and proper operation of the battery.

It also works as an isolator so you can hook up your battery circuit for your charge line, the battery, and as well as the output to your trailer brakes. So it's an all-in-one solution for getting a breakaway switch set up. Having this working to charge the battery and operate your breakaway switch.You can get this by itself if you just need to replace a damaged battery charger for your existing breakaway system. Or you can get this with a kit that comes with a battery box and breakaway switch so you can replace the entire setup on your trailer if you need to.Here we've got two different battery chargers. The one we just installed is from Curt and we have the one from Tekonsha here on the right.

They're both going to perform the same functions. The big thing here is the durability of the two. The one from Tekonsha here is just a heat shrinked components wrapped inside, so it doesn't really feel like it's going to be as durable as the Curt here. That being said, depending on the space that you have, this might be the better option.Your battery box here may not have quite as much room in it as this one does, so we're able to fit the Curt inside of our battery box here. But if yours is very tight, you may want to consider going with the Tekonsha because you could keep it entirely inside your battery box.

The Curt here is more suitable for being outside the battery box, so if you do have one, a small box and you want a mount it on the outside, this would be a good option for that. So it really just comes down to the space that you have available for which one's going to be the better option for you. If you've got plenty of space, then me personally, I'd recommend the Curt because it just feels more robust.We'll begin our installation at the breakaway switch battery box. Our charger is either going to be located inside the box or just outside the box. We have nothing located outside of ours, so that means ours can is going to be on the inside.

So we're going to remove the screws to the cover of our box here. Yours may or may not have screws, it may just have a quick latch. We just need to get inside so we can access the charger. We've now got all the screws loose on our battery box, we'll take the cover off and inside we see our charger here.Our charger has three wires that we're going to need to connect. One is the battery positive, which clips onto your battery there. And then the other two, you'll have one that connects to your breakaway switch, which the blue wire here off of our old one, we can see it going to the blue wire, which routes right over here to our breakaway switch. And then the black wire here is our charge line wire from our 7-pole connector from our vehicle that's pulling our trailer. You can trace this back. Typically you can either trace it to a junction box on your trailer or to the 7-pole connector. Black is the most common color that you would have for your charge line. You could also hook your truck up and just use a test light to verify if you have power on this wire.So we're going to go ahead and remove our old charger. We're going to start by disconnecting it from the battery by just pulling that spade terminal off of the battery there. We'll then need to cut our old wires. So we're just going to snip off the black one and we're going to snip off the blue one and we can move our old charger out of the way. We'll then want to separate out our circuits here for the ones that we want to connect. So I'm just going to get the other ones out of the way there, and we've got our black and our blue. We're going to strip back both of these.Then we'll take our new charger here and we see that the wires here are quite long on our new chargers. Since we can make our connections right here, we don't need all this extra length. So I'm going to go ahead and just trim this down a little bit. I'm just going to trim it down to the same length as the red wire, since we're going to keep everything inside of our battery box here. Cut both of those. And then we're going to strip each of these back. The red one we don't need to strip back, because it already has the spade terminal precrimped on it and that's what's going to go onto our battery positive post. The black wire on our charger is for the charge line from your 7-way. And the blue wire on our charger here's for the breakaway switch for the output for that. Twist both of these. Twist both of these, And then we will use butt connectors to crimp everything together.We're going to be using heat shrink butt connectors even though this is a sealed box that should keep out most moisture, there is a hole here in the side for wiring to pass through. And it's possible that moisture could get in here so we want to make sure we protect our circuits from corrosion. You can pick up heat shrink butt connectors here at etrailer.com. And we've chose those because when you apply a heat source to them they will shrink down over the wire, sealing out any dirt, debris and moisture, ensuring a long-lasting connection.We crimp one on the blue wire and then we already know that our blue wire here on our trailer's for our breakaway switch, so we're going to attach that to the blue wire coming off of our new charger. We'll then connect our battery charge line wires, which we know is this black wire here coming off of our trailer, so we'll just crimp that on there. And here on the other side, we'll place our black wire in and crimp it there as well. Before we hook up our red wire, we'll go ahead and grab our heat gun and we're going to shrink down those butt connectors. Now that we've got those crimped down, we can go ahead and connect our red wire to our battery positive. And the little spade terminal, we'll just click right on there.Now you have the option, you can mount your box. There are two holes here on each side that you could run self-tappers through, or you could use a zip tie to run it through those holes and secure it to something. Since we've got a box here, we're just going to store ours down inside the compartment.So now we want to just test out to make sure that everything's working. The main goal here is that our battery is going to have power to be able to apply our brakes in the event of a catastrophic disconnect. This is all a safety mechanism to ensure that those brakes can apply in that event. Got our test light here so we can just test it out to make sure it's sending power where it needs to. We can see that we've got power at the battery here and I've already taken the cover off of the junction box down here below. The stud located down here is our brake circuit. We've got nothing on there right now, so we can go ahead and pull our breakaway switch pin. And when we do so we get it to power up. If I put the pin back in, power is gone. So we know that our breakaway switch is working. It's sending power down to our junction box, which from there it goes to the trailer brakes at the back.Now if you wanted to check your brakes, you could jack it up and spin the wheels just to verify that they are working properly. That's a great test just to verify that the brake mechanisms are also working at the back of your trailer.And that completes our look at Curt's Breakaway Switch Battery Charger.