Tekonsha Plug-In Wiring Adapter for Electric Brake Controllers

Video Transcript for Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2018 Ford F-150

Speaker 1: We're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 proportional trailer brake controller. This works for one up to four axles. Its part number is 90195. We're also going to be using the Tekonsha brake controller adapter pigtail, part number 22292.Now the big advantage we get with the P3 over other brake controllers especially the time delayed brake controllers. With it being proportional, it senses the negative acceleration of our truck or the deceleration and it brakes accordingly. So if we really jam on the brakes hard, it's going to give us braking power back to our trailer brakes very quickly.

If we do it just in more of a stop and go traffic situation, it applies the brakes lightly. Essentially what that's going to mean is when the trailers doing its fair share of the work in a heavy braking application, you're saving wear and tear on your truck and the same vice versa on your trailer. So for if we're in a light braking situation, you're not overworking your trailer brakes, causing those to wear out prematurely.Now the P3 can also be mounted in just about any position as long as we keep it straight in line with the direction of travel. That's going to give you a lot of mounting options on where you want to put it. Even if you wanted to go like down on the dashboard or something like that.

Really not going to have any limits.Now to change our braking output, we've got our buttons right here. You can see max power is going to be 14 and we can bring that all the way down to zero. Zero would of course be when you don't want the brakes on your trailer to be applied. And then we can slowly bring that up to the adequate braking performance that we're looking for. That's going to vary on road conditions and it's also going to vary on the load that you have on your trailer.

The more weight typically the higher you're going to set this. And a rule of thumb is to set this just below where the wheels on your trailer will lock up. So on a lighter load they're going to lock up sooner than with a heavier load. So we'll just move that up.Then when we operate it, you can see it's going to go up to that 2728 if that's where we have it set. Whether we do our floor brake, when we're in movement or a manual override here.

Now if we move that up, whether we hit the brake on our floor again or we hit our manual override, you can see it's going to go up to what we have set. So we're never going to have to worry about the trailer locking up and causing it to be unsafe.Now with those settings properly adjusted, you're never going to have to worry about your trailer tires locking up and causing you to be in an unsafe situation. The next setting's going to be out top right hand button. That's for our boost mode. Now that's going to change the quickness and aggressiveness in which your brakes are going to be applied. So for our lighter trailers, we really don't need it. We can typically brake with our vehicle, everything's going to be safe. But as those get heavier and heavier, we want those to come on more quickly and more aggressively to keep everything handling properly.Now in standard small utility trailers pulling it behind your vehicle, you're probably just going to leave boost level off. You can see we've got a truck here with a small trailer. Now in boost one, we're going to a slightly larger utility trailer or tandem axle. Boost level two, that's going to go up to more like a fifth wheel style trailer. And boost level three, again a larger trailer than that. Now that changes the quickness and aggressiveness in which your brakes are applied. So as our loads get heavier, we want those to come on more quickly and more aggressively to keep everything nice and safe.Now we also have our menu here. The menu allows us to change our display settings, whether we want to change the brightness or the color. It's going to allow us to change the brake type. So with this controller, not only are we going to be allowed to use electric brakes but also electric over hydraulic. And then finally we've got our help mode here, if we needed some assistance. The P3 will also allow you to program a couple of settings. So if you have different drivers that kind of like the brake controller set up differently or if you have different size trailers, you can have them preset in there. Be able to get to them without having to change all the settings.Now the manual override lever you can see is really easy to get to here. This is designed to allow us to apply the brakes of our trailer without applying the brakes of our truck. Typically this is used in a sway event type situation.And now if you'll take a look at the screen, it's going to have disconnect warning. So if the trailer plug we're to wiggle out somehow or not be connected properly, it's going to flash and let us know. As soon as we get that plugged back in and we have a proper connection made, it's going to go right back to its normal operating mode.Now to get our pigtail installed, we need to find the matching plug for the gray side. The black side's going to go to our brake controller. Now on your F150, that's going to be right on the back of this cubby hole. There's a plastic clip molded onto it and that plug goes right into the back. But we found kind of a side access to it, by taking this down, makes it a little bit easier in my mind. So you just want to kind of reach in here underneath the steering wheel and pull out starting at the top. Going to do that on both sides. You can see how that cover will just rotate down.Now we're going to use a 10 millimeter socket and we're going to pull out one, two, three, four bolts. Now this panel's going to rotate down a little bit, we'll just lift straight up on it. Just goes in those two little tabs here go in these slots on each side. Now we can reach in and I'll wiggle that plug and you'll see that little cubby moving. There's a tab on the bottom side you need to press up on and then you can pull straight out. Right here, here's that little tab that we pushed up on to release it.At that point, it's just going to be a direct for our pigtail. Snap that in, give it a pull. Everything's good and connected. Now let's test our pigtail and see what functions that we have available. The blue wire is going to be your brake signal. So that's going to go from the brake controller back to your trailer. Our white wire is ground. The red wire that we have here, this is going to be for the brake signal or the stoplight switch signal. And our black wire should be power. Now on some F150's, it's going to have power and some F150's it's not.So I'm going to test my ground by holding my clamp there and then test the black wire. As you can see I don't have any power coming through. Next thing I'm going to test will be the red wire. To do that, I'll have to use my hand. So I'm just going to get my ground from the steel under the dash. Hold our tester on our red wire there and then you want to press the brake. As we press the brake, that's going to come on. So now with this version of the truck, it's the XL version. This isn't powered in our variation. So what we'll do now is head out underneath the hood to the fuse box. We'll show you where to look there for the plug in for that.Now the fuse box we need to find is going to be right behind the battery. We've got one small panel here. We just need to lift this up slightly. So you press on this tab on the front, lift up, and then kind of push it rearward just a little bit, so you can get it up and out of the way. Next up, we'll push the tab on the front. You can see that fuse panel top slides off of there.Now right in the middle of the box, we've got a large relay right here. We want to go to the right of that. We go down two or three fuses kind of right there in the middle, you can see the little JK fuse right here. This is a 25 amp fuse. This is for the power going to your trailer, your 12 volt power supply. You can see we've got an open hole here just beside that. That's in the opening, which is numbered 24. You can see this opening right here, those two silver tabs that stick up. That means that spots pinned. If we look at this one, it's not pinned. So if yours is pinned, you're going to take a fuse that looks just like this on that 30 amp. And you'll just slide that down in, just like I'm doing this one. Just slide that down in til it stops. And at that point, you should have power inside on your plug. If you're in our situation to where it's not pinned, you'll want to do the next step. Which is just going to be to run your own power wire inside the vehicle.Now if you don't have pins in your fuse box, if you don't already have power to plug, it's not the end of the world. We've got a kit and it's going to include the breaker, the wires and the connectors you're going to need to go from your battery here. And we're just going to run back along the firewall. We're going to mount a breaker. This breaker's designed to protect the brake controller from overloading if it's drawing too much power. It'll phase out until it cools off and comes back down. So it just help protect the system. We'll start by mounting this. We're going to do that on the firewall over there close to the brake booster and then we'll get our wires ran. We'll show you where they go inside and where to make your connections.You can see we've got a good spot right up here on the firewall to get our breaker mounted. We'll use the provided self tapping screws and you'll want to use a quarter inch bit driver to get it secured. We can get that one installed.Now we're going to run the power wire over closer to our battery, just to kind of get everything routed. I'm using a piece of air line that I've taped it off to. You could use a coat hanger or a stiffer piece of wire. We're going to run it right underneath this pad and come out over there closer to the passenger side. Now on this side, we can just take this little keeper off. You may have to pull out on it with a hook there. You can see our tubes there. So bring it on over. We'll just use that wire or your air line to get that pulled on through. We don't need a bunch of excess over here. We'll put our sheet back up and then you can just push that back into place.Back over on our breaker side, we'll just want to snip our wire there. We're going to get that stripped back. You're going to slide on one of the ring terminals with the smaller opening on it. We'll want to crimp that down. Make sure that's connected well. Then again, the wire coming from the battery needs to go to the copper side. The battery's going to be the last thing we connect. Just so we'll won't have any power going through any of these wires. We'll slide our serrated washer on. Then thread on the nut. We'll use a 3/8 socket to get that snugged up.Now we'll take the side of the wire we trimmed off and I'm going to route it right in behind that. And we're going to strip the end off this side of our wire, going to add on the same style ring terminal. That'll be connected to the silver side here. Now we'll get that one snugged down.And if you look on the firewall, just to the right side or on the driver's side of your brake booster there. You'll see that grommet goes right through on the top. There's a little circle. We're going to trim the end of that circle, so we can slide our wire through. Now for the inside of that grommet, we'll need to cut that open as well. You've got your steering wheel here, this is the left side driver vent. You want to go just underneath that with your panel down, you'll have this opening. Look straight back at the firewall and you'll see the grommet. You'll see the wire that's coming out of it here and there's going to be a circle just above that wire. Let's cut an X in that to allow our pull wire to come through.Now we're going to do a similar thing with our wire to pass it through the firewall that we did to pass it back in behind that pad. You can see we're just using a shorter piece of the pull wire. We just need to get it down and go through the hole we created in that grommet there. Now we can just pull through our slack. We'll route our pigtail. Down here we're going to use it. We'll use one zip tie just to secure that plug right up here where it'll stay safe and keep it from bouncing around. Once we have that secured in place, just trim off our excess and we're ready to get our dash put back together here. We'll just press in all the way around the dash, make sure it clips back in place.Now we're going to tap into the harness here. This is only going to be if you don't have power out there. As you cut into that, you can see we're going to cut the sheathing off. You don't want to actually make contact with any of your wires. Out of the harness just enough so we can trim it off there. Strip that back. Give it a twist and we'll add a butt connector. Going to use one of our standard yellow butt connectors. It'll be in your kit. Get that crimped on.Now we'll just take a second. We're going to choose the path we want to run our black wire from that grommet over here to our pigtail on. Get it zip tied out of the way. There's a couple wire looms up here that I'll use. This way we don't have to worry about it hanging down or going over making contact with our brake pedal or anything like that. We need to get to that butt connector. We're going to strip it and crimp it in place. Pull it make sure you got a good connection. And then just for the sake of looks here, it's going to be tucked up behind our dash but we'll just run a piece of tape up there and cover that up.Now I'm just going to mock up my controller. You've got two brackets to choose from. I always tend to go with this metal bracket. I just like the way it mounts up. It's easy and simple and it's actually going to fasten and secure into the side of our brake controller as well. There's also the one that has the smaller mount with like the plastic clip. If you're going to be taking this brake controller out and switching it from vehicle to vehicle, I think the plastic clip is the better option. This is going to be staying with our truck. So I'm going to do the more permanent mount. Now you can choose any location you want, as long as there's nothing in behind the dashboard. You're better off to go on this side somewhere though. If you go anywhere in this area, you can go down low. But if you put it up on the dashboard here anywhere, you're probably going to hit with your leg when you get in and out.This controller as we said earlier, you can mount it in just about any position, 360 degrees. You want to keep it straight in the direction of the line of travel. So right there is going to be very convenient, easy to get to and it'll stay out of the way. Right there, I'm going to go with it. Be about an inch down from that corner. Now again we're going to use a quarter inch bit driver, our self tapping screw to secure it to the dash. See our machine screws there that we're using. Just line that up with whatever hole you choose, get it started there. Just going to tighten both sides down evenly. So it holds our brake controller secure.Now at the end, closest to our battery, we'll get that stripped back. And this time we're going to add the larger ring terminal on, so we can connect it. Now I'm going to connect right to this stud. So before I put the ring terminal on, we're going to pass that wire up through this cover. We can attach that larger ring terminal. Get that secured, give it a good pull. We'll just pull that stud off. For that you'll need a 12 millimeter socket. Place that ring terminal right down over. Then we can put our nut back in place. Now we're going to use a couple of zip ties. Then we'll just get our wire secure so it's not moving around. And that'll complete our installation of the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 proportional brake controller, part number 90195 using pigtail 22292 on our 2018 Ford F150.