To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
This proportional brake controller has simple controls and a digital display for diagnostic information. Includes 3 boost levels, a slide-bar manual override, built-in battery protection, automatic leveling, and continuous diagnostics.
Features:
Specs:
You can adjust the gain (also known as output) with the thumbwheel on the front of the controller. Gain lets you set the maximum amount of power that will be applied to your trailer's brakes. A heavier trailer will need more power to achieve smooth, safe braking, while a lighter trailer will need less. Typically, the gain is only readjusted when you experience changing road conditions or if the weight of your trailer changes.
The boost setting controls the aggressiveness of your trailer's braking, meaning how quickly the brakes reach the maximum braking level. You can adjust this when you're towing heavy loads and you need more umph to bring your trailer to a stop. Your tow vehicle doesn't need that much power to brake in time, but your heavy trailer does.
Depending on the level of boost, your trailer brakes can start at either 13 percent or 25 percent of the set gain. What this means is that, 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.
If your trailer weighs less than your tow vehicle, no boost is needed. But, if you want your trailer to lead the braking, you can select level B1.
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 adjust the boost, use the blue push-button on the top of the Primus IQ.
The Tekonsha Primus IQ comes with an easy-to-reach, slide-bar manual override, great for stopping sway or controlling your trailer's momentum in emergencies. To engage the manual override, just push the slide-bar to the left, towards the center of the controller. This will activate the trailer's brakes and brake lights without you having to apply the brakes on your tow vehicle, perfect for limiting trailer movement while you're cruising.
The Primus IQ can mount between -90 degrees and 90 degrees vertically, but the brake controller still needs to be horizontally level and parallel with the direction of travel.
After mounting the Primus IQ unit in your cab using the included bracket, simply plug the included custom harness into your vehicle. The other end of the harness plugs into the brake controller. To remove the IQ for storage when you're not using it, just unplug the unit and slide it out of the bracket. With a replacement wiring harness (sold separately) and replacement bracket (6927 - sold separately), you can even transfer the IQ 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).
The Tekonsha Primus IQ brake controller comes equipped with proportional braking to give you the best towing experience. Proportional braking means that your trailer brakes mimic your tow vehicle's brakes. If you slam on the brakes in your vehicle, 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 Primus IQ 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.
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Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Male: Today on our 2009 GMC Yukon we're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Tekonsha Primus IQ Trailer Brake Controller. This is a proportional controller that works from 1 up to 3 axles. It's part number is TK90160. Here's what the Primus IQ is ultimately going to look like once we get it installed. If you can see, we've got a single red dot right here. That indicates that we've got power to the unit. If we go ahead and hook up the trailer what we're hoping to see is this switch and show a small "c". With the "c" being displayed that means that the brake controller does recognize our trailer.
We've got our wires hooked up properly. A few quick things about it. We've got a slide manual override lever here. This helps us to apply brakes to our trailer only in the emergency situations where we start getting some sway or we need to get it straightened back out. On the side we've got a dial. This is going to allow us to adjust the amount of braking force that's being sent back to our trailer. We can turn this all the way down to 0 or all the way up to 11.
That will give us maximum effectiveness of the full 11 power, the maximum power that the brake controller can send to the rear. Since it is a proportional system it's only going to use as much of that as what it needs. The small button on top, that's going to control our boost levels. We've got "B" blank. That's not going to be a boost setting. We've got "1", "2", and "3".
Depending how heavy the trailer is in relation to the vehicle that we're towing it with, we'll want to set these accordingly. The heavier the trailer the higher we want to go on our boost mode. This is going to give us an initial immediate breaking force to get everything started. Then it will revert back to the proportional aspect and only use what's required to get our trailer and vehicle safely stopped. With the proportional system rather than the time delayed system this is going to allow us to use just the braking force we need. It won't cause the brakes to overheat or something like that when we're sitting at a stop.
This uses an internal accelerometer. As we are heading down the road and we apply the brakes it recognizes that and sends that signal to the rear. The harder that we hit the brakes the more power is going to go to the rear. The easier we hit the brakes, if we're just in stop and go traffic just kind of easing along it's not situationally correct, then it's not going to give us much braking power so we're not wearing out all the components on our trailer. Every time we manually override it will come up to our maximum braking potential that we've got set, whether we set that down to a 2.3 let's say or all the way up to an 8.0, when we hit that lever it will activate for us. A few really nice features about the Primus IQ are going to be first it has a continuous diagnostics check. It's going to check and make sure that we have the proper connection between our vehicle and our trailer. If we don't we're going to see this "c" turn into an "NC" indicating that our trailer has come disconnected and we need to address it. Another nice feature, we've got an auto leveling system in the Primus IQ, whether we set it at about 0 or all the way up to 70 it's going to level itself out. We're not going to have to worry about levers and switches to try to get it dialed in. Also has protection built right in that can protect both your vehicle brake controller and trailer from an overload situation. To begin our installation we need to find our factory pigtail. We'll go right straight behind the parking brake release lever here. It's going to be a little piece of black plastic. Right behind there, you see this little piece of white wire and then it's got 4 wires that run down and all have tape on the end. We'll turn that back. Then we can pull those on down. We've got a dark blue, a blue with white, a white, and a red with black. Now we can start pulling the tape off the end of our wires here. Our next step will be installing the pigtail on the existing wiring. Strip back the red and black wire. Add on one of the provided butt connectors. The two bigger wires, the yellow ones go on. The two smaller, the blue ones that are provided will go on. Crimp that down. That's going to connect to the black wire from our Tekonsha pigtail. That's our power wire. That's why we connected it to our power source. The dark blue is going to be our auxiliary. That's going to be our brake wire. This is where we're going to connect our blue wire. That's going to give us the brake signal to the back, to our trailer. Next we've got our white ground wire. We'll get those connected. Finally we've got our red wire. That's going to go to our light blue and white. Let me just kind of bring some tape all the way down and clean it up. It's nice and clean and be ready to hook into the back of our brake controller. Let's get it mounted into place. Now we're going to have 2 bracket choices here. We've got the quick release style. The back is going to slide in here. It will clip up into 3 different positions. You can see 1, 2, and 3 here on the side of the Primus. Just like that. As you can see we can bring this up, bring this down for a little better adjustability. Or we've got what's kind of been the industry standard or the most common brake controller bracket here. Also nice and adjustable down there at the bottom. You can mount it fixed at the top. They both share about the same hole pattern here. For our install today we're going to use our standard bracket. We've got a great location right here underneath the dashboard that we can use to mount it. You can see we've got a screw right here that holds the tab in. It goes up to metal behind it. I really like this. What we're able to do is back the screw out, bring our bracket right up behind there. Then we put the screw right back in. Then we'll put a self-tapper right over here on the other side. There's a nice surface there. You see we've got our bracket installed. I like going under dash here because we won't have to worry about any holes or anything. You've got the option of going anywhere up through this area that you like down through here. I'd use a little bit of caution going over here on the left side up high. You might bump it with your knee when you're getting in and out. With this being a proportional system as long as we stay within our tolerances for our degree of angle we can mount it wherever we want as long as it's within reach where it can be safely operated. We can take our brake controller and one of the self-tapping screws. Bring it up. We're just going to put that right through the side into the hole in the side of the controller. Let's get our second 1 done back here. Kind of loosen it up, give us a little bit of flexibility and do the same thing on the other side. We'll pick the angle we want and cinch down our bolts. All right. Nice and snug. Now all we have to do it plug our pigtail in. I connect it into the back. Let's get our wires secured up and out of the way here. They'll tuck in nicely behind a little floor vent heater here. We'll just put one zip tie around it just to make sure it doesn't come down on us. Right down here wrapped around the wire loom there's a red and black wire. Pull it up. See, it's going to have kind of a flat ring terminal on it already. We're going to route that over to the smaller of the 2 posts that are here on the front side of our battery box. Just take a flange nut, put that down on there to hold it in place. We're also going to look right here to the side of the box. There's another wire. Pull that one out as well. That one gets connected to the opposite side right there on that little bit larger stud. One of those are going to provide the 12-volt power that you're going to need at your rear trailer. The other one is going to provide the power for our brake controller so we can get a signal to it. Tighten those nuts. You're also going to want to have a 30 and a 40 J-Case fuse here. That's what makes the connection for that to run our power through. The vehicle already had it installed. We won't have to worry about it. Bring our cover back on. Now with our simulated trailer connected there we're going to go ahead and test it by moving our manual override over. What we're hoping to see is our needle go up. With our trailer connector getting the signal we know our brake controller's working great. That's going to complete today's installation of the Tekonsha Primus IQ Trailer Brake Controller. It's part number is TK90160 on our 2009 GMC Yukon. .
Easy to install and very affordable.
Quick install works Great
Worked great!
easy to install
Just what the doctor ordered. Thanks
The package arrived on time (actually a day early!). It came with the correct Harness. It was easy to install and is working properly!
Great for the price
was easy to install and works great
Easy to hook up , works flawlessly
Simple hook-up when using the model specific harness.
Easier to install than expected. Works flawlessly
Very easy installation.
Easy to install and works great no issu es
Haven't tried it yet but it was very easy to install plug and play if you have tow package already
fast shipping, it installs easily. It's too early to comment on how good it works.
I went to all my local trailer places, auto parts stores and no one had a clue as to what I needed or how to install a brake controller. U-haul wanted $600 dollars to install a controller.
I visited e-trailer, bought $92, worth of parts, and watched an installation video, and a couple of hours later I was ready to tow.
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