T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-Pole Flat Trailer Connector

Video Transcript for Trailer Wiring Harness Installation - 2017 Chrysler Pacifica

Today on our 2017 Chrysler Pacifica, we're going to take a look at and also show you how to install the Tekonsha T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness with the 4-pole Flat Trailer connector. Part number is 118723. Now, this is going to deliver 4.2 amps per side, for our stop and for our turn signals. For taillights, we have 7.5 amps. This should be plenty to power any standard size trailer lights. This is what our wiring kit is going to look like when we lay it out. This is our main goal here. This is what we're after, to have a working 4-pole trailer connector at the rear of our vehicle. Now, this is going to give us our right turning brake, our left turning brake, running lights and also the ground for our trailer.

Now, to deliver that signal, it's going to get input from behind the driver's side taillight housing with the yellow and brown wire. The green and white on, it goes behind the passenger side taillight housing. Those signals come into the converter box here and that converts it into a usable signal for our trailer. Now, this box does isolate the trailer wiring from our vehicle wiring, so even if we have shorts or some kind of malfunction in the trailer, we don't have to worry about it harming our vehicle. Also so we don't overload the lighting signals, we've got a 12 volt power wire that's going to come off, that runs directly up to a power source under our hood, like the battery. That feeds the power that the box needs to generate that power going out to the trailer. It's not drawing extra power through the wiring system of the vehicle itself.

You'll see there's also a ground wire there. We'll either use an existing stud if there's one available and if not, provided self-tapping screw here is going to do the job for us, through the ring terminal that's already connected. Now, you can see we've got out 12 volt power wire here. That's what we'll run up to the battery. That's going to connect through a fuse holder and something I like about Tekonsha, they've provided heat-shrink butt connectors, to give us superior moisture resistance and plenty of zip ties here, so we can get everything secured along the way and we've got some double-sided foam tape there to help secure our converter box. Also, detailed instructions are going to help us out with the job and make sure we get it done correctly. Now, to begin our installation, we need to remove the two taillight housings.

We've got one on each side here. You can see there's two torque-bit bolts that are holding it in. We've got one here, one here, these are going to need a T-30 torque-bit to get it out of there. Pull those out. Then we want to push with our hand here and wiggle that light and it should come on out of there for us. Once we've got it out, you can see we've got our connector right here.

It's a little red lock. Pull out on that. Then, we'll press down on that gray part and remove it. Just like that. Set that aside somewhere safe because we don't want it to get scratched. We'll do the same thing here on the passenger side. Now, what we're going to do is use a piece of airline tubing here. We're going to run it down behind this rear face just so ti will come out at the bottom. I know airline tubing isn't the most common thing to have around your garage, so if you don't have that, a stiff coat hanger would also work. Just clip it and stick it down there. We should be able to reach up from the bottom side here and find that. Now, we'll do the same thing for the passenger side as well. What we're going to do is take that yellow, brown and white wire, tape it off to that coat hanger or airline tubing that we brought down from behind that housing. Now, we're just going to draw that using our wire, right at where we can make that connection with the taillight. Once we have that pulled up here, just peel back that tape, free that up. We'll pull that up far enough so we have both of our plugs readily available. You'll see there's dielectric grease on that already. Put a little dab on the other one. If you don't have dielectric grease, this is part number 11755. This helps prevent any moisture or dirt from getting in there and eventually causing corrosion. We'll slide that together until we hear the click. Push our locking pin back in. I want to place that right back down in where we pulled it out from. Then, we'll use this as our new connector at the back of the taillight. Get that slid in. Give it a good pull to make sure that it's firmly connected and we'll slide our light back into position. Now we'll re-secure it with the bolts we removed earlier. All right. Now, before we tuck our box up in there too far, I'm going to go ahead and make the connection with the bulk wire that runs up front. We'll use our heat-shrink butt connector that was provided. We can crimp it on there after we've got it stripped back. We're going to take the end of our provided wire, we're going to strip that back as well and it will go in the other side. Now, to shrink those down, we can use a mini torch, we can use a heat gun, or just a lighter will work out too. You just want to be careful not to overheat them to where they turn colors. You want them to keep their original color and when it's shrank down fully, you'll see the wire almost look like it gets a little bit bigger and then a little bit of clear gel is going to come out of the end. Now, we're going to find a nice flat area to mount our converter box. That's going to be right around this edge on the back side. Of course, it's going to be tough to see, but what we'll want to do is take a little bit of rubbing alcohol and clean off the back of our box and also clean off the surface that we're going to mount it too. We'll give that just a second to evaporate and while we do, we can apple our double-sided foam tape. Put it right on our box. Take the other protective cover off and we'll slide it right up into position there. We just want to make sure that sticks on really well and we can take care of getting our ground set, which right there will be a great location. It should be nice, thick material. We use the provided self-tapping screw and you'll need a quarter inch bit driver. We'll get our hole started first, there. We'll place the crew through our ring terminal, back up into position, and we'll secure that down so that we can't wiggle the wire around. Now, our 4-pole wire and our green wire, we're going to run that over towards the passenger side. This is where some of the zip ties are going to come in handy. We just want to secure it off as we go across. We've got small brackets that come down as bumper supports there, so we can run this right in behind those. That will keep it up and out of the way. The same with our 4-pole. Then, we'll stop our 4-pole here once we get in the middle. Get that zip tied off there to provide an anchor point and then we can continue running the green wire on across. Now, we'll tape the passenger side off here to our pull wire and get it pulled up and we'll make our connections the same way we did on the driver side there. Now, we'll draw this one on through. Now, something I like to do on this side is, draw up all of the slack, make sure you don't have any hanging down anywhere near your exhaust, then I'm going to zip tie that off right here to make it an anchor point. We're going to apply a little more dielectric grease to these and we'll make our connection. Now, the factory side of our connector, I'm going to tuck that down and away and also any extra green wire we have here, we can get that tucked down. All right. Now we'll slide our housing into place here and replace the two torx-bit bolts. Now, for our d-pole here, we want to decide what kind of length we're going to need to make our connection. Once we've determined that, whatever excess you have, we'll just tuck that up and secure it off to that wire when we did the other parts. Now we can use a zip tie to attach our 4-pole there if we'd like. In or case, what we're going to do is just bring it around the hitch and bring our dust cap right around there. That will keep it up, keep it from bouncing around while we head down the highway. Now, we're going to run our 12 volt power wire up to the front of the vehicle. The battery is located on the driver side in that front corner. That's ultimately where we want to end up. Now go right over the top of the hitch here, just really need to avoid any sharp edges or any significant sources of heat. This will be an area, you may just need to go around it, pull a little bit of tension in it and then anchor your wire out further ahead here. You can see this cross member here. That will give us a really nice secure anchor point. We won't have to worry about any wire trying to hang down back there. You'll see right here are the brake lines. We'll just work around the fuel tank and try to tag along with those while we head up front. As we work forward here, we're going to run up above this panel. Keep everything nice and safe. We'll just pull off these 10mm plastic nuts. That will allow us to drop it down just a touch there and get it behind it. Now we'll just re-secure it. Once we're beyond there, we can come up, we're going to run right up to that front driver side corner like we talked about. If you still have that coat hanger, you might want to attach that and try to use that to push it through. Typically though, we'll be able to push what we want up in there and then find it once we get up there to the top. All right. Now we'll head up top and find it. We just want to ensure that we pull out all of this slack, so that we don't have anything hanging down. We'll grab our wiring and we'll pull that up for now. Again, we want to make sure we get out all of the slack and then, just like before, we want to choose a nice solid anchor point. In this case, there's a wire loom down here underneath the air box we're going to use. That will just prevent any of the slack from going back under the vehicle. Now, we're going to be connecting to this stud. This is our jump start stud but it's connected directly to the battery there. Pull up on this cover. Give you a little bit better look at it. You can see the battery positive terminal is basically this whole section, so you've just got a cover over it like that. We're going to pop that up. Open it up like that, that will give you a good look at it. We're going to keep a short piece of extra wire in case we ever need to make any changes with it. We can just trim off our extra there. Next, we've got our fuse holder here. You can see, we'll pull that out and strip back each side. Also strip back our wire from the back of the vehicle there. Now to the black wire, we're going to add our heat-shrink butt connector. We'll add in our fuse holder to the other side of that. We see, we've got the fuse out. We'll add that right after we make the connection to the battery. Get that guy shrank down. We'll add our ring terminal onto the other side. Now, well need a 10mm socket. That will go right on the end of that stud and typically, once it's broke loose, it will thread right off of there. Place our ring terminal in behind it and thread that back on. Get that secured down. Check our cover. It won't quite close with it straight back, so we'll turn it don just a little bit. Now, we'll place the fuse in the fuse holder, get that capped off. Now, we just want to take, you remember that little bit of excess that we had, just wrap that up and get that secured off lower here. We want the fuse holder to be visible, that way, if there's ever a need to change the fuse or something, that will be available. We'll us that hole in the bottom of the fuse holder to bundle the wires on one side and then we'll secure it to that same wire that we anchored to. Just pop that closed and we can replace that top cover. All right. We'll get it tested out and make sure it's working as it should. Now, we're going to take part number I26 here, it's just a standard 4-pole tester, we'll slide that in and we'll make sure our lights are working as they should. All right. We'll start by turning on our headlights. Then we can do our left blinker, our right blinker and our brakes. With everything working as it should, that's going to complete our installation of the Tekonsha T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-pole Flat Trailer Connector, part number is 118723, on our 2017 Chrysler Pacifica.