Tekonsha Battery Charger for Trailer Breakaway Systems - 12 Volt DC

Video Transcript for Tekonsha Trailer Breakaway Systems Battery Charger Review

Hi there, safety conscious haulers. Today we're going to be taking a look at Tekonsha's Accelerated Battery Charging Device. It's simply clicks onto your existing breakaway switch battery and then just wires up to your power source and your breakaway switch. The main purpose of this charger is to charge up your small breakaway switch battery, which isn't intended to have a high output and it's also not intended to have a high amount of charging amperage so you don't want to overcharge the battery. Well, this charger will limit the input to the battery so that way it's trickle charging it and you don't overcharge it and ensures it stays topped up without blowing it over. It also limits the output on the circuit going to your breakaway switch, so that way we don't stress our battery out too much when we send the signal out in the event that we have a catastrophic disconnect when our breakaway switch is pulled because our battery does only have a maximum output that it can handle and we want to just make sure everything is under control, so our charger is going to limit all those things for us.This will make a good replacement for an existing breakaway switch battery charger that you have, or if you don't have one already, it's a great addition to help ensure that your breakaway switch battery lasts as long as possible.

We'll begin our installation by accessing our breakaway switch battery box so we can get to our charger. There's four screws on top of this battery box we're going to be taking off. Yours may vary a little bit. We just need to make sure we can get in there so we can access our charger to replace it. I'm going to go ahead and remove these four screws and inside we'll find our existing battery charger.We'll then remove our cover so we can see the wires.

We've got our negative and positive on our battery, and this is our existing charger that we're going to be replacing. Coming off of our charger here, we've got three wires. We're going to be cutting each of these three wires so we can connect our new one. Now the blue one here we don't need to cut, because our new charger already has a terminal on it ready to slide onto our battery, so that one we can actually just pull off of the battery. But we do need to cut the blue and the black wires, so we're going to go ahead and snip both of those.

Since we don't need our charger anymore, it's no good. We can snip it as close as we want to the charger.We're going to take our new charger now. We're going to plug it into the positive on our battery. Then we have two wires that we need to connect here. The black wire is your charge wire, so this is going to connect to the charge wire coming from your seven pole connector.

Now I already tested it and I know that this black wire here is connected to the charge wire on our seven pole connector. We also need to hook our blue wire up, and this is going to actually attach to our breakaway switch. We'll be adding a breakaway switch in this install because our customer currently doesn't have one. His old one was damaged and is long gone, so we're going to need to add one of those and connect it in between.This blue wire here is the brake circuit that goes to the trailer brakes on our vehicle. Our breakaway switch is going to be wired in between those two. So, this will go to breakaway and then from the breakaway we're going here. I'm going to go ahead and help you determine which is your correct wires if you are unsure. We're going to open up our junction box real quick and I'll show you how you can test to determine which is your brake circuit and which is your charge circuit.This is our seven way connector wiring going into it. One of the things we need to make sure of is that we have our charge wire run over to our battery and we need to know which one the charge wire is. On ours it's a black wire coming off of there and it's actually going to this post here that we've put a little bit of black paint on. If you plug your trailer into your truck, that should power that circuit up because it is your charge circuit. You just want to hit your tester on there. We can see we've got power all the time. I've got my tester plugged into the seven pole right, now supplying power on the 12 volt circuit.We also need to determine which is our brake circuit. That's typically your blue wire. I've got my tester on right now, powering up the brake circuit. If you have your truck plugged into your trailer and you have a brake controller, you can use the manual slider to power up that circuit. You may need an extra set of hands with someone holding the slider over so you can run back and test the trailer. Again, that's typically your blue wire, and you can see we've got power on it there. If I turn our tester off, I remove that power, and this would be as if you let off your manual slider. Now that you've identified which circuits we're going to be connecting our charger to, you can ensure you're going to wire it properly. Now since ours already have wires running over to our battery box, we're just going to be connecting it to those. I just wanted to show you how you could determine on your seven pole connector which circuits you needed.We're now back to our wires and again, we explained that this is our power and this is our brake, so we can go ahead and hook up the power wire now, our black one here. We're just going to go ahead and strip that back and we're going to strip the other circuits there back. We're just going to use a butt connector to connect the two together. We are going to use heat shrink butt connectors, as they will seal each end of the wire where we crimp it on, keeping out dirt, debris and moisture, preventing corrosion and ensuring a long lasting connection. I'm just going to slide our circuit in there and then crimp it down. Then over on the other side, we're just going to complete that connection to the black wire.Now for our blue circuit. Again, we do need a breakaway switch, so we're going to be mounting our breakaway switch up. The length of wires are pretty short, so you may need to extend those, depending on where you choose to mount it. We're going to be mounting ours on top of the frame right next to our battery box here, so that way our wires can poke inside of our battery box and we can make all our connections inside. We're going to be attaching it just using a self tapping screw right into the top of the frame. Now, a screw doesn't come included with your breakaway switch, but you can pick up self tappers here at etrailer.com.Sometimes it's a little easier to make the mounting portion of it if you just pull the pin out of it. That way you don't have the wires hanging there. And again, we're going to put it there due to the wire length so it'll fit in our box. Now we're just going to take our self tapping screw and run it down this single hole here in the back. When tightening down your breakaway switch, you want to make sure it does still have some movement, as it does need to swivel for proper operation.We're just snugging it down and then just verifying that it can move. We just don't want it to be so tight that it's very stiff, so that's pretty good there. It can move with enough ease. Because if your breakaway switch is cocked at an angle or it's not right when you have a catastrophic disconnect, it can pull crooked on your pin, which could just break the end of your pin. We want it to be able to move the breakaway switch to where it's in a position where it can pull it straight.Now that we've got our breakaway switch mounted, you can go ahead and plug the pin back in. We're going to route our wires into our battery box here. You may not have a battery box exactly like this, but the main goal is that these two wires need to go to a power source and then the other wire's going to connect to your brake circuit. The charger here is in line and this is going to be the output from the charger for our power, so we're going to connect that one to the blue wire. We can go ahead and strip both of these back.We're going to just crimp them together again using our heat shrink butt connectors. Then the other wire here coming off of our breakaway switch is going to be the output going to our brakes on the trailer, which we know is this wire here. Even though these are blue and black wires in the breakaway switch, it doesn't really matter which wire you connect to which one. We could have hooked the black one to power and then the blue to the output. It really doesn't matter in the switch. It's just completing a circuit. We're going to strip both of these back. The main intention is that you have one of the wires hooked to power and the other one hooked to the brake output. We're just going to butt connector those two together and then we'll hook these two together. Now that we've made all of our connections here, we can use a heat gun to shrink down all of our butt connectors.Now to show you that our charger's working, I've got our old battery here and I've got my test light. The old charger wasn't charging the battery at all. We had nothing. The battery's completely dead. If I check for power on the battery, I don't get anything. We're going to go ahead and turn our tester on, which is simulating your truck. If you we're to plug in your truck, your truck would send 12 volts down its seven pole. We're now doing that, and if we test it now we can see that we're charging the battery.We're now back here at the wheel, and you can see that I can spin it. I've got it jacked up. Now I'm going to go up to the front. I'm going to pull the breakaway pin and we want to verify that our wheel is no longer spinning, that our brakes did apply. I've gone ahead and pulled the pin. Now it's here in my hand. Yep, they are locked up, so we are good to go. Everything's working properly. That completes our look at the Tekonsha's Accelerated Battery Charging Device.