Video Transcript for Curt T-Connector Vehicle Wiring Harness Installation - 2009 GMC Acadia

Hello neighbors. It's Brad here at etrailer and today we're installing a Curt trailer wiring harness on a 2009 GMC Acadia. So here you can see our trailer wiring installed and hanging on our hitch here, has this nice little cap. So let's take a look. As you can see, this is what's going to plug into our trailer wiring, and that's going to allow you to send the signals from your turn signals, and your brake lights and running lights to your trailer. And that's going to allow the people behind you while towing to see what you're doing and it's going to keep you safe and legal.

Now installation is very straightforward, you'll simply remove your tail lights, plug it into the factory plugs, and then they jumper onto your tail lights. It's all very easy. Everything's included in the kit that you need to do it. And really you could probably do this in your driveway and with minimal amounts of tools. I'm going to walk you through it so you can get your trailer wiring installed.

To begin our install. We're going to open up the rear hatch and that's going to gain us access to these plastic little plugs here, 'cause we're going to need to go behind the tail light to access those plugs. So I recommend using a small flathead and just kind of getting the crack there and give it a quick twist and it should pop open. Do that to the top and bottom. And then back here, you're going to see two seven millimeter bolts.

So we'll go ahead and loosen those up. Now, once you have those loose, you can already start to see the tail light kind of moving a little bit. And so we're going to need to pop this out. The plastic here does sit kind of behind this rubber trim. So pretty easily just kind of wiggle it back and forth.

And there is going to be a tab kind cut on this back side. So a little bit of force and wobbling back and forth should allow that to come loose. Be patient with this step. I want to make sure you don't break any of the clips. And also if any hardware drops like I just did, make sure you pick that up, 'cause you're going to need it for install. Now with the tail light out, you're going to see this plug here that goes to our tail lights. This is where we're going to be connecting. So go ahead and repeat the same process on the passenger side. Once getting into the clip, you're gonna see this red tab here, simply going to pry this up. That's going to help pull this up and it should pop out like that. And go ahead and set your tail light, maybe inside your hatch or somewhere safe to where it won't fall. So now I take the harness and kind of lay it out so we can get an idea of where it's all going to run. So obviously you have your four-pole here and that's going to be close to the hitch so you can attach to your trailer. Now, your yellow and brown wire, these are going to go to your driver's side. And they're simply going to plug into this factory plug with this and jumper on to that same plug on the rear of the tail light. In order to get this ran, we're going to need to go underneath and feed this up. Now that seems like it could be a daunting task, but there is a good method for it. And here I have a just spare airline that we have around the shop and you don't necessarily need one of these, any string or maybe a wire, whatever works to fish this down. And what we're going to do is take this up and pull it through. And once you kind of just wiggle this through it may get caught up on a few things but once you have the airline or your fish wire pulled through, you'll be able to connect the connector to it with some tape. So we have our wire pulled through. Now, I'm going to tape this up onto the actual cable. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to stagger it out. And that way it keeps it a little bit more narrow when pulling it through. Sometimes it can get a little bit tight so spacing that out to where it's not a big bundle is going to make it a lot easier. We just wrap it around enough to where it shouldn't come off easily. Now we'll simply pull this up. Now, be careful on this step and you may want to kind of feed underneath as well in that way you know it's not getting caught on anything and it can get a little bit tight up here at times, so don't put too much force on this. Just kind of simply move it back and forth and find that groove. And if you do need a little bit of extra space, you can actually remove these little clips here and there's going to be screws and pull the fascial out. But I think we should be able to slip this through pretty easily. There's one. And then the next. Now we can take our fish wire off, and as you can see, pretty simple. It's the identical plug to the OEM one. And really all this is doing is making a jumper here. So you're going to connect this female end to the male end of your factory plug. Make sure it's nice and snapped in place. And then this part of the plug is simply going to attach where your factory one went to on your tail light. Nice little audible click there. And now you may need to tuck this a little bit, just so that tail light can go back in place, but it does look like it has plenty of space. So very carefully just set these cabs. You can see these little pokeys here. Those are going to simply slide in there and then it should line up where your screws will go into place. Now we're going to be using the same fish wire technique to feed our plug, our green and white wire, I should say with our ground up to our passenger side. But before doing that, we want to route our wire in a way that it's not going to cause any issues, hang down, make contact with the exhaust or become damaged long-term. So I'm simply using the inside of this bumper and the impact bar as well as the hitch and just rounding it over to where it's going put our four-pole right where it needs to be, and also get our other plug to the other side. Now, once I have it routed properly, and I know it's not going to make contact with any exhaust, I can go ahead and zip tie this into place. So on the passenger side, it's going to be the same as we did on our driver. So we'll simply plug this in. And then plug in our tail light. Now, before doing that, while I have a little bit of clearance here, you're also going to notice this white wire has a ring terminal on it. Now this is going to be our ground. So we're going to need to take the self-tapping screw that's included in the kit and mount this to raw metal here. So we'll find a good spot for it to make sure that there's not any clearance issues putting the taillight back on and we'll get this drilled into place. So on your ring terminal, you're going to see that one side is flat and the other side has the wire on it. You're going to want that flat side facing against the metal. So I kind of mocked up my tail light just to see clearance wise, where the best spot is going to be and I think I'm gonna do it right about here. Now, sometimes it makes it a little bit easier by drilling a small hole there, and that way you have a pilot to run the self-tapper through. But if you don't have drill bits around you can also just zip this into place, just be patient with it. Now with your self-tappers and you want it tight, but this is a good chance while it's in place to move this back and tighten it down. But you don't need to crank it too hard because it can break the screw or strip out that metal. So as long as it's stuck, you should be good. Now we'll just simply take our plug, put it into our tail light And then put this back in place. So I have all my wiring ran and zip tied up. And with this hitch, it's kind of nice so there's these dropdown for these two holes. So I actually ran my four-pole through there and that's going to keep it in place. I also put a little bit of wire loom on there just to kind of keep it looking good. Now you're going to see included in the kit is this dust cover, and this simply slides over the four-pole and allows you to cap this up when not in use, keeping your connection nice and clean. Now, another twofold thing with this that a lot of times customers will do is when not in use, they use it to hold this in place through their safety chain loop. And that works perfectly fine. We also sell brackets here that require no drilling, and they're going to zip up to your hitch and allow that pole to stay on there and it looks really, really nice. But that's up to you depending on the look you want and how you want to mount your plug. So really the only final step is to test to make sure that the wiring is working properly. Now there's two ways to do this and you can buy a four-pole tester here at each trailer. And these are really nice because it's going to isolate this plug. So that way, if you plug it up to your trailer and something's not working, it's possible your trailer could be the problem, not the wiring. And this here will tell us for sure if our wiring is working well. So simply plug this in and I'm going to run it through the sequence of brake light turn signals and our running lights and we're going to see these lights light up and know that it's working. So now I'm simply going to run through the lights. I'm going to check my running lights first, my left turn signal, my right turn signal, and finally my brakes. And that was the look and the installation of the CURT trailer wiring harness on a 2009 GMC Acadia..