Video Transcript for DIY Install: Universal Installation Kit for Trailer Brake Controller on your 2015 Subaru Forester

Hey everyone, January etrailer.com. Today, I have a 2015 Subaru Forester and I wanna walk through how to install the Redarc Tow-Pro Elite trailer brake controller. Now, in order to get that installed on this vehicle we're also gonna have to install the ETBC7. When we're thinking about is putting a brake controller on a vehicle, especially for a vehicle like this the Subaru Forester probably does not have a very high tow capacity. So you can see here. This is a, probably about as big as it's gonna get for towing a trailer with brakes on it.

That's gonna be maybe a small pop-up. And we think about a brake controller though. We think about the traditional ones. It's like a little box that you gotta mount it somewhere on your dash has to be mounted in a certain way. If it's twisted at all or lean in a certain way or the angles off it can cause the brake controller to malfunction and not work correctly.

Well with the Redarc Tow-Pro Elite, they've fixed that. They've actually made it to where it's a little bit enough. You can mount it pretty much anywhere on your dash that you can find enough room for the back and the back's pretty small, the actual controller for it. Now it's anywhere under your dash as long as it's not connected on the factory wiring on a solid surface in any orientation because it's gonna learn the way that you're traveling or the way the direction that you travel. So it makes it really nice for installing this brake controller.

When you compare it to having to put one of the traditional types in this is what a brake controller is actually going to look like when you compare this to the traditional ones. As I mentioned before there's actually one extra mode in this. So in the traditional one, you have your manual override which this has to simply you just push the button and that's your manual override for this one. You have your proportional mode and your typical one which what that means is when you apply the brakes in the vehicle, it's gonna match that pressure, going to the trailer. Now the numbers on the dial or base feed the gain, unlike the gain that is on the traditional brake controller.

When you apply the brakes here in proportional mode it's gonna match the pressure on the trailer but whatever number it is, is gonna gradually build to that number. Now, the extra function that this one's gonna have that the traditional brake controllers do not have. It's gonna have user mode. And what user mode is, is let's say we are pulling a trailer, we're going down a gravel road, down a hill. As I mentioned in proportional mode, when we set that we apply a breakdown car, this is gonna apply the same amount of pressure, but gradually build to that number and user mode. When we gradually apply break in the car, it's gonna automatically go to that number. We have set on the dial. So again, if we're going down a hill gravel road we have a trailer behind us, what we don't want Is we don't want the brakes on the trailer to gradually applying, go up to that number because we may end up sliding down the hill from the way the trailer. We want it to jump to that number. So the trailer is helping slow down the car as we're going down that hill. So once you get the brake controller installed it's gonna blink like this. Whether you, once you have it hooked up to your trailer it's gonna blink blue to green what that means is it's calibrating the direction of travel. So again, as I mentioned you can mount your main control unit in any orientation as long as it's mounted to a hard surface. This is what's gonna tell you that it's calibrating. So you may have to drive it around for about 10 or 15 minutes for it to calibrate that direction. But once it does it's gonna turn blue or it's gonna turn green. When you apply the brakes, it's gonna turn red. Now, blue is gonna be your proportional mode. Green is gonna be your user mode. The number on the dial when you apply the brake that number is gonna change to a different color and you can see the higher, the number the darker the color gets. Now, again, we're still calibrating the direction of travel and you can still see, it kind of comes on there. As we get up to 10, it goes to red, as we come down it'll start getting lighter. It starts to go to a lighter pink or purple or violet now we'll run through those colors again and show you. Let's go ahead and drive the car around and get this calibrated. As I mentioned, once it's calibrated it's gonna stay one color if we apply the brake you'll notice that the color is gonna change depending on what number we have it set at. So the higher, the number, the darker or closer to red is gonna get which means the amount of power you're getting back to the back now to change it to right now, we're in proportional mode to change it over to your user mode you're gonna put it in park pilot brake. You're gonna push the manual override within two seconds twice, it's gonna change to green. Now using manual override, again going down a hill, gravel road. We apply the brake in the car gradually. It's gonna automatically jump to whatever number we have it set at. Seeing here it goes directly to that color. There's no gradual build like we had in proportional mode. You can kind of see how that gradually builds to that darker red color. That's basically what your brakes are doing on your trailer. Again for that to, user mode. Apply the brake, put it on zero push it twice within two seconds. Let's see I'm barely touching it going directly to red manual override. You're probably gonna use most of the time. That's gonna be more of your highway driving user mode again, it's gonna be more of if you're off-road somewhere and you don't want the trailer pushing the car around what the manual override does is let's say our trailer starts to sway a little bit. We want to push the manual override. So it applies the brakes on the trailer without applying the brakes in the car. Because if we apply the brakes in the car and we're again we're gonna sway situation that's gonna cause the trailer to sway more. So we don't want to apply the brakes in the car. We only wanna apply them on the trailer, push the button applies the brakes on the trailer. Again, remember once you have the controller set up and you have a trailer on, you need to turn the dial to whatever number that you find is the best for pulling that trailer for setting it up. Once you hook up to your trailer the best thing to do is find an empty parking lot. Get up to about 15 to 20 miles an hour. You're gonna turn the dial probably to five and then push the manual override. If it locks the brakes up on the trailer all you do is turn that dial down a little bit, do it again push it until the trailer is not slamming on the brakes or dragging the brakes you wanna be able to. When you hit your manual override for it to slow down and come to a stop and not drag. As far as the installation process it's pretty straightforward. The hardest part about the installation is gonna be finding a place to mount your controller and find a place to mount the main unit. Once you find that, everything else is pretty simple and straightforward. To start your installation in order to install the brake controller on the Subaru Forester with it not having a factory tow package you're gonna have to use the ETBC7. Those can be found here at etrailer.com. You're also gonna need your 4-pole wiring. If you don't have that now with these Subaru these 4-pole wires mount inside the vehicle. So we're gonna have to figure out how to get this out right here behind the hitch. There's a rubber grommet that you can put a little slice in it. Under the spare tire, put a little slice in it. You can put that around that wire and then put a little bit of silicone around there to seal it. Put the plug back in. This is gonna allow us to hook up to that 7-pole plug in the ETBC7 so we can run the wires up to get it hooked up to our brake controller. Another thing that's not going to come in your kit is this bracket. This is a no-drill mount bracket. It's a long bracket. You can also find there those here at etrailer.com. It's gonna come with the clamp and you just clamp it directly around your hitch, tight it down and you can cut off the excess that's there. Now our 7-pole plug is gonna come with a bracket. That's gonna mount directly onto this. Let's go ahead and do that now. So the ETBC7 kit is gonna come with your 7-pole plug and this bracket. We're gonna mount this on this bracket first. So we'll feed our wires through and make sure both 4-pole plugs go through. And normally this would mount like this and this 4-pole would be over here, but due to some of the height restrictions and the way I have it set up I'm actually gonna mount it this way. This can get a little tight, because if you notice this side is a little bit longer than this side. So this 4-pole doesn't like to stay in here all the time. What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna put it in there. First I roll my screw through I'm gonna use a 7-pole to hold it down so it doesn't come out. What we need, we're gonna have four bolts lock washer, flat washer and a nut. We want to put the lock washer on. We're gonna feed it through the hole put a flat washer on the backside, along with the nut. We're gonna do that in all four corners. Now I'm gonna mount this bracket to this bracket. The reason why I did it this way you can see it's got a little bend in it. This is more of a personal preference. That's because I want my wires to run up and over rather than down and under. So we'll set it just like that. And then it'll come with two screws, get it lined up with the correct hole and then a nut, with a star washer shirt on it, put on the other side. And then we can come back and we'll tighten those down either with Phillips flat head and a small socket or wrench. Next, what we can do is we can connect our 4-pole wiring from the vehicle onto the 4-pole plug on the back of our 7-pole. Now we can do this a couple of different ways. You can cut these and you can splice them together. Or you can hook your 4-poles together like this, rid off that, 'cause we won't need it. We'll take a zip tie. We're gonna run around here. And then once we connect these two then we can tape everything together. Adding a zip tie on it is gonna help ensure that those two plugs don't come apart. Now the yellow wire is gonna be for your reverse light signal. We're not gonna be using it. So I'm just gonna tuck it up here for now. We're gonna be using the black and the blue. Black is gonna be power, is gonna run up to our battery. Blue is gonna be our brake signal. I'll put from the brake controller. Our white is gonna be our ground which we gonna do in a later step. I'm gonna go ahead and get these connected first in your kit. you're gonna get a roll objected wire on the inside it's gonna have a black wire and a white wire. The black wire is gonna connect to the black wire on here. The white wire is gonna connect to the blue wire, whereas strip back, both wires black to black and white to blue. Now what I'm doing here, is I'm taking some electrical tape and I'm taping up each of these connections separately first, I'm gonna leave this white wire with the ring terminal hanging out and I'm gonna take these together. Now, what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna ground my wire. You'll notice the black stuff on the framing. What I did, is I scrape it down. You wanna make sure that area is clean. So you get a good ground. Kit's gonna come with its self-tapping screw to get that installed and make sure where you're putting it's good. A good piece of nut hole. You can see this as doubled up so we should get a good ground from that. Next, we need to wrap this end up to the front of the vehicle and into the inner compartment. Let me get it down real quick and I'll show you how I did it and get our wire ran up to the front of our vehicle. We wanna make sure we're staying away from anything hot or moving. That there is went over top the hitch because it sits right up against our spare tire pan. When the cross light lifts over top of my rear suspension when up above this bracket right up here, that'll hold it up. For many of these moving parts down here came down behind this hard line, this cup right here at the top. It's a hard top. It actually, as a cup for this rear suspension component that went over kind of over there, around the inside of it but stayed up top of it came down right here went right through this part of the frame rail. I fed it over. See right here took a few little plastic screws off this edge. And you can see where my line runs from here all the way up to the front came out here went over the top of this plastic panel here right behind that hard line on the inside of my wheel wall there. Firewall area, what I use as an airline tube to get my wire pulled up there. You use anything wire hanger or anything like that. It's a little stiff that you can see down. You can see it through. There's plenty of space. And then once you get it up top and you go up we'll make all the connections inside the engine perfect. Next, our wire that we pulled up we need to cut the jacket off of it. You want to be careful when doing this. So you don't nick the wire. Once you get it off and separated you determine where you're gonna put your circuit breakers. You're gonna get three of them. You're gonna get a 20 Amp, 30 Amp and a 40 Amp. This brake controller will requires a 30 Amp. The ETBC7 uses the 40 Amp. So what I'm going to do is and you can see right here, marked right there, 40 Amp and 30 Amp what we need to do, is determine where we're gonna mount them. Now I can mount them both up here, but I have to run to the battery and I don't want to run over the top of the fuse panel in case somebody needs to get into it. I can extend the wire and come over this way or around this way, or right there is a nice flat spot. I can just trim this out and I can mount both of these right here to make my connections to the battery and then run inside through the firewall, which, I think that's what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run there. This is just cardboard. I'm just gonna cut a square out of it. I build a nut on there and your kit's gonna come with self-tapping screws to get these mounted so, give a one minute, quick process for the other one, next thing we need to do we need to keep it in mind where your 40 Amp and where your 30 Amp is going is, is. Because that's gonna determine how your connections are made our power wire coming straight from this 7-pole plug in the back in your kit you're gonna get a few smaller ring terminals and a few bigger ones for these connections we're gonna be using the smaller ones. What I'm gonna do is my power wire coming from my 7-pole connector, right to the silver post on the 40 Amp circuit breaker. There I'm gonna take some extra wire. I'm gonna go from the copper post to this positive side of the battery, I'm not gonna make that connection yet but I need to add a small ring terminal and a large ring terminal. After that, we'll cut another piece and we'll go from there to the copper post on the 30 Amp. The rest of it's gonna go from here inside through the firewall with our white wire and connect to the brake controller. We're gonna strip this back. Black wire, that connected on to the silver post and then that back off, take our extra wire here. And our another small ring terminal there to our copper posts kind of wrap this like this trim that down and add on our large ring terminal. That'll go there. We're not gonna make that connection just yet, and take another piece trim it back and on the other large ring terminal that's gonna be routed same way except I need to make it to go to that post and we'll connect that on right here our remaining black wire, we're gonna strip back one end. We're at on our last small ring terminal add it to the silver post on the 30 Amp circuit breaker. We're gonna take this white wire and this black wire from right inside through the firewall, into the driver's side floorboard. In order to get in the firewall we have to go through a ground nuts, what I'm gonna use, I'm gonna use that large one right there. I double check that side. Wanna make sure you check in there see that there's nothing behind it. 'Cause we're gonna put a little split it to get our wires through. I'm just gonna use a utility knife. And then what I'll do, is I'll use my airline tube that I use to pull my wire up from underneath the vehicle. I use that to run it inside get them set back in here first. Yeah looks like I can just push in there. This is gonna come out kind of up to the right above your accelerator pedal. You just kind of pull down your carpet. You'll see this large grommet there. You wanna make sure you send your black and your white wire in. And then you need to determine inside the vehicle where you're gonna mount your brake controller is actually an extra little piece here but I think it's gonna be a perfect spot for it. We're gonna pop this panel off, take a trim panel tool. We'll just kind of get it in behind there. Pop that up like that and remove this screw. We'll pop this out. And we're gonna remove this panel here all around to kind of pull out like this and look at this. They don't want to pull too hard. You can see there's wires connected. We need to spin it like this. We need to remove that screw and what we're gonna do, is we're gonna push this panel out. Great, just like that, once you get that unplugged we're gonna pop this panel out. And we're gonna make our hole for our brake controller there it'll come out right here. This is what our controller's gonna look like. See, might have to do a little bit of trimming on that also. That should be okay. 'Cause you can see we can fit it in there. So, we won't have to trim much. We wanna get it mounted on here first in your kit, you're gonna get this little sticker see that little tab right on the top We want that facing up towards the top and centered. That's where your number zero on your brake controller knob is gonna be. The sticker peel off the back. Now from here what we're gonna do we'll drill pile hole right in the center. And then finally, I'm gonna go up to a 25 60 force. Make sure you don't go too fast with the drill bit like this because it will, you don't want to take a chance of crashing it. We're gonna take the controller itself. And this is actually the new, the most recent version. And actually the difference between these, it is this back piece is actually smaller. So it makes a lot easier to mount this in different locations within your dash. Let's take it. We'll go in from the back like this. You're gonna have a little clear nut. And will go like this. That's gonna slide down inside and you're gonna thread it on. The next way you want to do before we get this knob put on for good, I'm gonna take this I'm gonna turn it all the way to the, sorry, turn it all the way to the left lineup our zero put that there, it goes from zero to 10. You can see how I can push that, that kind of click. You want to be able to do that. That's gonna be your manual override. If you cannot do that you're gonna have to make some adjustments. And so you're able to get that done the adjustments you can make is you can pop this back off and that little plastic nut that we put on you can tighten that down a little bit more. Looking at our wire. It's gonna come like this. This is another thing that is different about this one compared to the previous version is the previous version had, a phone cord end and it was stiff to about like this long you can see this one's pretty easy to move. So again, this is gonna make it a little bit easier to get it installed in different locations. I think this will plug it into the back of our brake controller. I'm not sure this guy is gonna wrap through here. We're gonna test fit this to make sure we don't have to trim anything out on this panel. As you can see, I was able to get it in without having to trim anything and that fits in with the rest of our panel, easily accessible. Once you get it in place you got everything adjusted the way you need to. And you can go ahead and put your panel back in place. Either screws put back in and then get your side panel. That's when you determine where we're gonna mount our controller unit. Now you can mount this in any orientation. One thing we can not do is we can not zip tight to factory wiring because we want as we want it to sit still. So then it, you can determine how it's actually moving the forward movement of the car. We have it on any wires. Those wires can move around and it won't get a good reading. So, what I'm gonna do, I think I'm gonna mount it just like this and get as far away from the foot rest their the ped as possible. It's gonna come with a couple of self-tapping screws. We'll pop this off just out enough. 'Cause there is wiring back there and I don't want to take a chance of damaging it. So you're gonna get a plug in your kit. It's gonna look like this. It's gonna go on one side and then your plug coming out of your actual controller is going to plug in the other side before I plug this in. I wanna get these wires. So they're not hanging all over the place. I want to run them up around this bracket right up the top here, it's actually open. My hands are kind of big. I'm gonna try and get these wires to fit around it as much as I can. I'm gonna keep the white wire down here 'cause that one's gonna be my ground wire I'm gonna ground that right over here on this side our black wire that we ran in from outside it's gonna connect the black wire. It's gonna meet our power, blue wire it's gonna hook to our white wire. Red wire is gonna hook to the wire coming out of the cold side of the brake light switch, which we'll test that and I'll show you here just for a second. Let's go ahead and get these connected. We'll get our two wires cut down to size the black, white one that I brought in I actually ran them up over the top. It's really hard to see, where your brake pedal arm goes up go up and over top of it. And that'll keep these two wires away from any of the moment components doing your et cetera in your brake pedal just cut my black in my white one, there is, and again blue wire and can go to the white one that you ran there from outside. Okay, the black. Okay. Now for a brake light switch and this plug actually goes to the brake pedal switch on the brake pedal arm on the backside of it. What we're looking for is this white wire with a red strip. Now you test at this, we're gonna get test light. We're gonna plug it right in the back. We only want our test lights come on. When the brake pedal is pressed that means we've got the cold side of the brake light switch. So what we need to do is our red wire has to tie into it I'm gonna take this connector I'm gonna get it around that wire put that wire inside of it, and then close it up. We're gonna take our red wire, I'm gonna put it in like that. I'm gonna take a pair of pliers. And I'm gonna cut that down. Once you get your red wire crimped in there close the up, like that, when you take these wires. I'm actually gonna pull them up to the side here this time right up to this factory wiring to get them up out of the way where they're not seen. So the small white wire coming off of the plug that goes into our main unit, make sure the terminal has to go out, and has to connect to the negative side of the battery we can not just ground it to a metal surface inside the vehicle. So what we're gonna have to do, is we're gonna take the white wire that we cut off of here off this main one. And we're gonna use it to extend this wire. Hopefully it's long enough. I won't know for sure, is better start running up, my white, the white ground wire coming off the unit. I just ran it up around that bracket right up here. The same way I did the other ones I got that, I take this and run it up and over. Our brake pedal. And, so this is my white wire. Just ran out. It's gonna go to the negative side. These two, is going to my positive side. I actually decided to hook them here. Instead of up there there was a, gonna be a little difficult to get off. So, now this way I can take them zip time, just like that. Our negative side, this is not actually the nuts is not actually made to come off all the way. So what we're gonna do, is we're gonna cut a little chunk out of the ring terminal. Let's fit in there. And then I'll take them back out. Now, my airline tube that I used to pull the wire up in the beginning, the idea is I got little pieces off it. I'll put them on the prongs on the circuit breakers. That way I don't take a chance of any metal object touch on either one of them. If you didn't use airline tube I would suggest covering those up. You can take some electrical tape, wrap it around and pinch it over the top into the post. After that, your wire loom that comes in your kit you can cover up your wires kind of clean up your install and you're ready to go. It actually, it was easier to mount on the other ones, you had to drill two holes where this one, one single hole. And you put the knob in put the controller in, the knob in and, I think the hardest part about installing this is finding a place to put it and then getting to that spot. Mm-hmm. And then find a place to mount the actual control unit that you can't attach it to the wiring. So it has to be hard mounted somewhere. Is there ahardest things. So, I think on the previous version a drilling template was included. Is that something that's included with this one or would it even be necessaryNo, actually, yes even the previous ones that template that they put in there, I don't even use it. I use the little ring that comes with it. Even the one with the little LED light as my template well I actually take that on put two pieces of tape, tape it in the spot where I'm gonna put it drill off tiny hole in the center and then open it up to the size of . Okay. So, somebody might use template, I don't this one is not it comes with a little stickerOkay. And you should have more options for mounting it because the back of that knob is smaller than the light. So this small and actually the wiring that comes off the back of it. It's not actually that's not actually the telephone cord anymore but the telephone connections. Yeah. It's a small plug and there's a lot of plug in that wire. It's a smaller wire. It is a little bit shorter than the other one but, it is easier to route it and to get it connected. Mount it to small for sure. So normally when you do a Tow-Pro, are there areas that you always avoid or is it always just specific to that particular vehicle Like you don't even know until you get in what's gonna be behind the dash or the center console or,No, I've done. I've done a few of them on Jeep. If the Jeep, if it gets mounted in the center, typically if you have an automatic transmission with the shifter in the middle, it's usually a lot of stuff in that area. In the middle of when you pop the off there's not any room to mount that, now with the new one maybe all the vibe with it. I know with the old one you could. Yeah. So it's really gonna depend on vehicle. If you've done the vehicle before they typically know where you can put it. If you haven't, it's just you're just gonna have to look and find it trying to get the spot. The Subaru behind you, is that where you're mounting this oneI'll show you. Okay. right there. Nice. Yeah, that looks like it. Yeah, that looks like straight from the factory. So that little piece on the backside on the previous ones that was plastic you actually had to make a hole where that little tip is at the top,Yeah. You actually had to make a second hole because that would fit down inside of it. Well, this is just a sticker and that is all that little thing is, is to tell you where your zero aims or what number you're on. That's it. So the light will actually come through the center on the backside and light up this whole thing. So that, the numbers there that's the stickerYou see it light upYeah. No, the sticker, the sticker is actually on this panel. I put it on the panel. The number is here on the knob. Okay. So similar to the other one with the numbers on the knob OkayYeah. So on the other one, when you you did that just the number would light up 'cause the LED light was only at the top. This one, it actually lights up the whole ring. Yeah, so I think that was part of the visibility that they we're going after too. Like in a dark cab, you could always tell that the whole thing was lit up with that one LED. Yeah. But otherwise, if you just wanted that extra affirmation that yeah I did actually make the adjustment that I needed or yeah. My, override is on. So that was just, the little plate is already in there. I mean, you didn't actually use like one of the custom plates, a little plate was in there. You just drilled right through that. Man Yeah. And that was easy enough to route the wire in from there. I take it, it looks like it was just down below. Man So I'm not at this side so that can go easily, because this, would have went up higher but, the emergency brake is in the center console. So, there was really nowhere else on this car to mount that thing. Yeah. I mean, it's so pretty well hidden. It's not gonna get in the way or anything, so yeah. Yeah, I think it needs to be as stable as it can be for the accelerometer to work properly. So it can be in any angle or orientation, which is great but it still has to be mounted to a steady surface. Can do it for what gap installation on the Redarc Tow-Pro Elite, trailer brake controller along with the ETBC7 on a 2015 Subaru Forester..