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The Tekonsha P2 is a classic brake controller you know you can rely on. It's easy to install, and with the custom harness, it's plug-and-play.
Features:
Specs:
Gain is the maximum amount of power that will be applied to your trailer's brakes. How much braking output you need is determined by the weight of your trailer; a heavier trailer will need more power to bring it to a stop. You want to go as high as you can without the trailer brakes locking up.
You can adjust the gain by turning the thumbwheel on the front of the controller.
The boost setting controls the aggressiveness of your trailer's braking, meaning how quickly the brakes reach the maximum braking level. If your vehicle takes too long to come to a stop, increase the setting. If it stops too abruptly, decrease the setting.
Depending on the level of boost, your trailer brakes can start at either 13 percent or 25 percent of the set gain. So instead of starting at 0, the brakes will start at 25 percent and get to 100 percent sooner. This keeps the trailer from pushing your tow vehicle forward.
Boost Levels:
| Approximate Gross Trailer Weight | Boost Level | Increase in Initial Power Output |
|---|---|---|
| Less than tow vehicle GVW | B1 | 13% |
| Equal to tow vehicle GVW | B1 or B2 | 13% or 25% |
| Up to 25% more than tow vehicle GVW | B2 or B3* | 25% |
| Up to 40% more than tow vehicle GVW | B3* | 25% |
*Both B2 and B3 offer a 25-percent boost in initial power. But the braking curve for B3 is more aggressive than that of B2. This means that, even though you will start out with the same intensity when using these boost levels, you will get an overall more aggressive braking experience with the higher level. So if you use B3, you will reach maximum braking sooner than if you use B2.
To engage the manual override, twist the rotary-style lever from right to left. This will activate the trailer's brakes and brake lights independently of your vehicle, great for stopping sway or controlling your trailer's momentum in an emergency.
The Prodigy P2 offers key safety features to prevent damage to your towing setup:
- Integrated reverse battery protection shields the brake controller and your trailer's breakaway system from shorts.
- When the P2 is not in use, it draws only 3.6 milliamps to minimize the drain on your vehicle's battery.
- Any time your vehicle and trailer are at a standstill with the brakes applied for more than 5 seconds, the hold feature will kick on and reduce power to just 25 percent. This will keep your trailer in place without your brakes overheating.
The Prodigy P2 also runs continuous diagnostics to check for problems as they come up, including:
Installing the P2 is incredibly simple. You'll mount the bracket to your dashboard then mount the unit to the bracket. Plug the custom harness into your vehicle and into the unit. Done!
Keep in mind that the P2 must be horizontally level and parallel with the direction of travel to work correctly.
With a replacement wiring harness (sold separately) and replacement bracket (P7685 - sold separately), you can even transfer the Prodigy P2 to another vehicle.
Note: If you don't already have a 7-way plug at the back of your vehicle, take a look at our exclusive 7- and 4-way brake controller installation kit (ETBC7 - sold separately).
Proportional braking means that your trailer brakes mimic your tow vehicle's brakes. If you slam on the brakes, your trailer brakes will activate with the same intensity; if you brake lightly, your trailer brakes lightly too. The trailer's braking is in proportion to your vehicle's braking. This saves wear and tear on the tires and the brakes on both your vehicle and trailer.
The Prodigy P2 uses an internal inertia sensor to detect how your vehicle is braking so it can send the right amount of braking power to your trailer. It measures the inertia of your tow vehicle and activates the trailer's brakes to slow at the same rate. The result is uniform braking across your towing setup. No push-pull action - just smooth, proportional braking every time.
Alternate Instructions
California residents: click here
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hi there ProMaster owners. Today on our 2016 Ram 1500 ProMaster we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install Tekonsha's Prodigy P2 brake controller. Tekonsha's Prodigy P2 brake controller is going to be an all in one brake controller with just about everything you need. It's going to allow you to have a brake signal at the back for your electric brakes. The system also works with electric over hydraulic. The slider located on the bottom is going to allow you to manually apply the brakes.
This is useful for testing and also when sitting on a steep inclined hill. Since this is a proportional brake controller, your breaks will likely loosen in pressure once you're sitting still, but you can go ahead and apply those brakes to help hold that weight so your truck's brakes aren't holding all the weight of your vehicle plus the trailer.It is a truly proportional brake controller. The inertia sensors inside will detect the momentum of the vehicle and help apply the brakes at the back appropriately. There's a sensitivity knob adjustment here on the side to help tune in the amount that you want the brake controller to be applying on the brakes on your trailer. Small button located here in the top is your boost button.
There's three different boost modes. Boost one is for when your truck is heavier than the load you're hauling. Boost two is for when your vehicle and the load you're hauling are roughly the equal weight. And boost three is for when whatever you're hauling is going to be greater than the weight of the vehicle pulling. You can also turn the boost mode off if you don't need it.Another feature that's nice about this, if you are using the boost mode it can be difficult when backing up due to the extra pressure that it's going to apply to the brakes, which can be a little jittery and you'll feel it in the back and it won't be comfortable, but you can override that by simply holding down on the brake and then holding the boost button.
After a few seconds an R will flash on the screen indicating that you are in reverse mode, so it temporarily disables the boost. Once you back up and you finished backing up, you can press the boost button and that will take it out of boost mode. It will go out of boost reverse mode by itself after about five minutes.To help us get our brake controller installed we're going to be using to Tekonsha's wiring harness with brake controller adapter. This is a nice harness kit because it comes with everything you need to get your lighting working properly, as well as all the wiring you need to get a brake controller installed as well with the seven pole connector. We'll begin our installation at the back of the vehicle.
We've got both our doors open and we need to access the back of our taillights so we can get to their wiring connectors.We're going to remove all the bolts that hold our side paneling in here using a Phillips head screwdriver. There's a total of seven bolts holding our paneling on. We'll remove the other side as well. We have a nice big opening here behind our paneling. Just inside you'll have your connector here that goes into your taillight assembly. We're going to press in on the release tab here on top and then disconnect our connector. We'll then take our new harness and we're going to plug that into the connector. You want to make sure you're using the one with the yellow wire on it because that's going to be for our driver's side. And then the other end here we can actually just plug right back in to our taillight assembly.Next we'll attach our ground wire. We're going to attach it to the ground stud just above our connector. We'll use a 10-millimeter socket to remove that nut. Take your ground wire, slide it on the stud, and then reinstall the nut right back in place. Now we're going to take our other connector. This is going to go behind your passenger side tail light. We're going to route it over to that side. To do that we're going to be going in here. We're to go up this channel all the way up. Then we're going to go across the channel there and then come back down the channel on the other side where we can plug it in. I'm going to go ahead and route that now and then I'll show you how I got it there.So we simply just pushed it through all the openings here, keeping our wiring inside. There's plenty of openings to get your hand in there, so you don't need any kind of pull wire or anything. Just slowly work it down through each port, going along the way until you get down here to your passenger side. We're going to plug it in on our passenger side just like we did the driver's side, by unplugging our connector, plugging that into our new harness, and then plugging our new harness into our taillight assembly.Any excess wiring you can just tuck inside of there. You can zip-tie it up later, keep everything nice and neat. You'll now have two other harnesses coming off of your module here. One is going to be a little bit skinnier than the other and they're going to have taped up wires at the end. Both of these need to get routed outside the vehicle. To do that we're going to be going down. There's a vent located behind this panel here. That's where we're going to be going out through that vent. I'm going to start with just the bigger wire. We're going to take that wiring and just keep feeding it down.Again, there's openings here so you can get in there to pull your wiring pretty easily. And once we get it down to our lowest slot there, you can stick your hand in and then we're going to push it through the vent that you'll find down there at the bottom. You're looking at the outside view, so you'll see where the wire is going to come through on the outside. Just take your wiring and push it through one of the slots, and you can just reach up there and pull your wiring down. We're going do the same process with the other harness and we talked about that's a little bit smaller.We'll now take the adhesive backing that comes in our kit. We're going to peel off one side, stick it to the back of our module, then we'll peel off the other backing of our adhesive and then apply the module to the flat part here in our vehicle. You'll want to hold it in place for about 20, 25 seconds to ensure that you have good adhesion. And then we started routing our harnesses. We routed the larger harness towards the center. This is going to be for our seven pole connector here at the back, so we're just going to leave it here for now. And then our smaller harness we routed all the way up to the front. To get it there we just followed the frame rail all the way forward.When routing your wiring you want to make sure that you avoid any moving objects, such as your steering and suspension, and anything excessively hot and touches your exhaust. You can follow it on your frame rail and you're going to have a couple of holes here that you can use some zip-ties at towards the back. And then once you get past your rear axle, we're going to have some factory wiring and from here we can just route it in the same mounting locations that our factory wires routed in if the factory connectors are large enough. So we just poked it in there, we poked it in there, and we just poked it in each one of those going down our frame rail, all the way forward.When you get further forward there's going to be a heat shield. Just route it on top of that heat shield. And then again we're going to keep following those same connectors, clipping it in those hold downs going along the way. We're going to go all the way until we get to our front axle. Once you've got your wiring routed up just behind your front axle, our battery is going to be located here in this box. If you reach around either side there's going to be some small access holes that you can use to get into it. It is going to be kind of tight, but you can push your wire through and pull it out the other side. Once you get a little bit pulled through, we're going to go ahead and go up on top and we'll show you a way to make it a little bit easier to get it through.To access your battery there's going to be a panel located on your floor just in front of the driver's seat. You just want to pop that panel up. In each corner there's going to be a little tab that you can twist that'll allow it to release. And once you get your wiring in there, you can kind of just take your screwdriver in here and kind of just give a little bit of pressure and that'll help free it up and make it easier to pull your wiring through. We'll now take each one of our fuse harnesses and we're going to place a ring terminal on one side. You'll have a total of three with ring terminals on them. And then on the other side of each harness we're going to be placing a yellow butt connector. You'll have a total of three of these once you're completed. All the hardware here you see comes in your kit.We'll now connect our harnesses to our battery positive post. We'll remove the nut here with a 13-millimeter socket. Place our harnesses on and then reinstall the nut. You will have to modify your cover in order for it to go back on. We just need to remove this small section here on the side because it's going to hit your wiring so it won't go back on. So we can use our snips and we're just going to trim that off. You could also just break it off, but if you want to get a little bit cleaner end the snips work pretty well.We can now peel off some of our wiring loom. We're not going to need all this loom that's on here. We're going to trim the loom back and then we can take our red wire and our black wire. We're going to trim those back now and these are going to connect to our harnesses. Our red wire is going to connect to the harness labeled, "tow harness power module 15 amp." So we'll strip this back and then attach it to that butt connector. And then our black wire is going to connect to the one labeled "seven way harness." We'll now strip back that wire and connect it to its butt connector.Our last fuse harness is going to connect to the other harness that comes in our kit that we haven't introduced yet. This is going to be our harness that connects to our brake controller. This harness has four wires on it. You'll have your blue, red, black and white on this harness and it's going to have a connector in like this. And this is our brake controller end. This harness is going to need power in order for our brake controller to operate, so our last fuse here, labeled "brake control power fuse" is going to connect to the black wire coming off of this harness. Now, these wires are already pre-stripped, but on some of them they may not be stripped enough to your liking. You can take a little bit more off. Now we have our blue wire that we ran up as well. This is also going to connect to the new harness we just introduced. We're going to connect the blue we ran up to the blue wire from our new harness. So we're going to kind of get those set, cut those to length.We'll now connect our two blue wires together. And now, there's a couple of ways you could do it. You could extend these wires or you could cut the harness because we're going to need these wires to go to a couple of different places that are going to be pretty far apart from each other. Our white wire is our ground wire, which we can run right over to our battery there. But this red wire has to connect to the cold side of our brake switch, which is going to be located underneath our dash here, so it's going to be pretty far away. So it's up to you whether you want to extend that wire and leave your harness intact, or if you want to cut it. We're just going to go ahead and cut ours open and pull our red wire out.Now we can take our white wire. We're going to crimp a ring terminal on that and attach that to the ground side of our battery. We'll now remove the nut from our negative battery post with a 10-millimeter socket. Take our new ring terminal that we just put on our white wire from our harness, slide it onto the stud, and then reinstall the nut. All the butt connectors that came in your kit we're heat shrink butt connectors, so we're going to use our heat gun now and shrink all those down.Now we'll take the red wire and we're going to route it towards our brake pedal. If you go up your brake pedal you'll see your brake switch towards the top of the shaft there. We'll use our quick connector to connect our red wire to the cold side of our brake switch, which is going to be the white and green wire. Take your red wire, poke it in, and then use a pair of channel locks or pliers to squeeze the center section down to quick splice them together. Then you can fold over the tab and lock it in place. We can now assemble our connector here at the back. Take the connector piece. It's going to have two sides. You've got the side here with the seal that you see on the inside. That seal on the inside is going to seal to your actual seven way connector that it's going to plug into. So this is the plug side and this is the side we'll be pushing our wires in.So if we take our connector like this, we're going to start at the top left and we'll work our way clockwise putting them in. Green is going to be our first one we need to insert. So it just simply slides in until you hear it click and then you see here it's locked in and it won't pull back out. Sometimes you have to twist them a little bit because the little tangs that stick out at the bottom go kind of towards the inside of the connector. And then lastly is our yellow one, which is our center pin. We'll now take our lock plate and put it in place. It just slides over the wiring like this. The back goes underneath those tabs there and that will line up our lock tabs here and they just push in and they keep everything in place from pulling out.Now that we've got those all snapped in, we can mount our seven way connector. You'll now need to install a bracket to mount your connector. A bracket doesn't come included with it, we're using Pollak 7-way bracket that mounts directly to our Draw-Tite's bracket mount that's welded onto it. We just use the hardware that came included with our bracket to get our connector mounted up to it and then we'll just take our connector in here. We put some dielectric grease on it to ensure a long lasting connection and we'll just plug it into the back. We'll now put in our fuses. Make sure you put the right one and the right harness. It's labeled on there which fuse goes in it. Once you've inserted your fuses you can reinstall the panel covering up your battery.Now that we've got our brake controller connection point installed, we're ready to install our brake controller. We're going to be using the plastic bracket that comes in the kit since it simply just slides in and out. We're going to be putting it on the right side underneath our steering wheel. You just use the screws that come included with it and a Phillips head screwdriver to run it right into your paneling. Once you get your bracket mounted up, we can take our brake controller. It simply slides down in the bracket and clicks in place. Then we'll take our brake controller harness and we're just going to plug it right into the back of our brake controller.And now you can see it's flashing NC, showing that it's operational, but we are not connected to any trailer, so you can go ahead and plug in your trailer now and test it out and make sure everything's working properly. Your installation is complete. If you don't have a tester you can just use your trailer at home. You want to make sure you have your left turn signal, right turn signal, tail amps, and your brake lights. With all of your lighting working properly, if you have a brake controller you can test it out now as well. So we've gone ahead and plugged in our brake controller and we want to make sure that we have our brake signal. We're just going to use the slider on our brake controller and you can see here on the gauge that our brake controller is working properly.We're going to go ahead and flip the switch on our tester now, and that's going to switch it over to the 12-volt auxiliary mode so we can verify that we've got our 12-volt power, which if we look here on the screen, we do have 12 volts. With everything working properly we can button up any of our wiring with some zip-ties and we're ready to hit the road. And that completes our installation of Tekonsha's Prodigy P2 brake controller on your 2016 Ram 1500 ProMaster.
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