Video Transcript for Redarc Tow-Pro Elite Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2019 Jeep Wrangler

Hey guys, Shane here with etrailer.com. Today, I have a 2019 Jeep Wrangler and I want to walk through how to install REDARC's Tow-Pro Elite brake controller. And when we think of a brake controller, we think of a brake controller that looks like this. In the new Jeeps, it is very hard to mount this. These have to be mounted a certain way. You mount it in the locations where it has to be mounted, or where it needs to be mounted.

It really gets in the way of your legs if you have the seat all the way up to the dash or even for somebody who is taller because the Jeep seats don't go back as far as they used to, either. So the Tow-Pro Elite fixes that. We'll take a look down here, this is what our brake controller is going to look like. It's gonna take up a lot less cabin space and it doesn't have to mounted any certain way. It can, really, be mounted anywhere, as long as this and the back part of it will fit in this spot.

The REDARC is going to be just like every other brake controller. It's gonna have proportional mode. But it's gonna go one step further: It's gonna have a user mode. Proportional mode's gonna be for highway use, normal, every day use. When you apply the brakes in the vehicle, it's gonna match that pressure on the trailer.

User mode: User mode is gonna be designed for more off-road use. If we're applying the brakes, lightly, in the vehicle, it's automatically gonna send whatever pressure or whatever number we have it set at in the gain button, back to the trailer. So it's not matching what we're puttin' in the vehicle, it's automatically sending the amount of pressure we have set, on the dial, to the trailer so that we're not relying on the vehicle to stop the trailer while we're going down that hill, on that loose gravel. If you see that blue light, that means you're in proportional mode. The numbers on the dial, you would set, depending on your load or depending on the load on your trailer that you're hauling.

What I want to show you is the blue light, in proportional mode. When we apply the brake in the vehicle, that blue light is gonna go from blue and, gradually, go up to a solid red. Number 10 is gonna be full power for braking on your trailer. And our manual override, you see how it went from blue, to purple, to red So now, user mode: As I mentioned, for off-road use. So put it in user mode, take your foot off your brake, put your foot on your brake. You're gonna push the nob, two times, within one second. It's gonna change that light to green. Now, what you're gonna notice that's different about user mode, is, if we have this set at any number, instead of being that gradual increase or gradual color change, it's gonna go from green, automatically, to red. So it's sending that amount of brake pressure, directly to the brakes on the trailer. It's not gradually building the brake pressure like it is in proportional mode. Same thing with manual override, directly to that color. Now, I kinda brought up manual override. Manual override is used when you just push the button, where, on a normal brake controller, you'd have to slide a lever over. All you do is push. You can see, it changes the color of the LED light to whatever number you have it set at. What the manual override does, is, let's say you're pulling a trailer, going down the highway, it starts to sway a little bit. You can touch the brake controller or the manual override, without applying the brakes on the vehicle. 'Cause if your vehicle or your trailer starts to sway and you apply the brakes in the vehicle, you're just gonna cause your trailer to sway more. What we want to do, is we want to get braking to the trailer but not from the vehicle. That's where your manual override comes in. You simply touch it and it's gonna send the brake pressure to the trailer, without applying the brakes in the vehicle. As far as the installation process, pretty simple and straight-forward. You mount your control knob somewhere on your dash. You're gonna have an operating unit that can be mounted in any orientation, up, underneath your dash. You're just gonna make sure it's mounted to a solid surface, not to any factory wiring, so that it can learn the direction of travel that the vehicle is going. Now that we've taken a look at some of the features, let's walk through how to get it installed. The starter installation, we need to determine where we're gonna mount our knob. This being a manual, right in here is probably a good place to put it. We're gonna go ahead and pull this off to make sure we have enough room and then we can start gettin' it installed. Now, what we're gonna do, is we're just gonna grab it and we're gonna pull up. Like that. Then we can just set it to the side. We're not gonna be able to take it all the way off 'cause of the boot, here, but we'll just slide it over, to the side, make sure we have enough room. You're gonna have a plug, here, and this is for your lighted cup holders. All you're gonna do, is you're gonna push down, right here, on this back side and you'll pull it right out of that connector. Push that to the side and, where this comes down, is right in this area. So, what we're gonna do, is we're gonna go and get our hole, here, 'cause we have enough room. We're gonna set it in place and see if it hits this. If it does, we might have to notch this out, just a little bit. Other than that, I think we can get our wiring ran, right back here and it should come out, right on the back side of the dash, over here. Let's start with our hole we need to drill for our control knob. So, with your brake controller, you're gonna have a little piece that looks like this. This is, actually, a ring that's gonna go on the outside. That's where we get our hole drilled. What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna use this as my template. So I'm gonna take some painter's tape and tape this in the spot that I'm gonna put it and then I'm gonna drill out the center of each one of those holes. What I don't want to do, is don't damage that ring because it is gonna go on. So we want one that's gonna fit. We can always open the holes up a little bigger, later on. Now this one just fits inside this hole. What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna start this so I can make my center mark. And I'll switch my drill bit, go back to the small one. And then we'll remove that piece and drill it out to the correct size. If you reach underneath, take these clips, and just push them together, you can pop them right out of the center, here, and pull this whole piece out. I'm finding that this rubber top is causing me an issue with getting the top two pieces to fit, flush on the brake controller switch itself. So that's why I'm pullin' it out. I'm gonna set it up on a table and kind of work with it and see what it's gonna take to get that to fit in there. So, what I did, is I took a step bit and I opened up this bottom hole, just a little bit more and then took a utility knife and kind of opened that top one up. You notice these little wings on here, what I did is I cut them down, about halfway, because the thickness of this panel and this rubber piece, I couldn't get it to go through, far enough to get this nut to grab onto it. If you cut those down, about halfway, and you can just take the utility knife, and they're real simple, you just push it until it gets into this edge and then cut down on it, it'll knock that little piece off. You're gonna take the LED light, it's gonna go up, towards the small hole, like that. I'm gonna take this piece and it's gonna fit, right over top of that light. You're gonna take this nut. We're gonna take a 12-millimeter wrench. We're not gonna tighten, tighten this down, we're just kind of snuggin' it up. The reason we want to do that, take this knob, turn it all the way to the left, take the zero, line it up with the light, then put it in place. And, what you want, is you want to be able to push it. So, if you get this on and you can't push it, turn that nut another time, put it on there, and you want to make sure you can do that. That's gonna be your override button. I'll set this back in place. And it looks like it is gonna hit it. We're not gonna be able to push this, all the way back down, in there. So, what we're gonna do, is we're just gonna notch this out, right here, on top. And I'm just using a rotary tool with a cutting blade. Now that we've got it notched out, go ahead and test fit, see if we have to make any other adjustments. It fits right in there. This is gonna be our plug that's gonna go into the back of our control knob and into the back of our control unit, which we're gonna be mounting under the dash, here in a few minutes. One end's gonna have a right-angle, one end's gonna be straight. What I'm going to use, is I'm going to use a right-angle on the knob, the straight end on the control unit. I had to get this down, underneath, and over to this side of the dash. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm using an airline tube and, right down here, right down here, it's open. You can take this and it comes out, right there. Now, instead of trying to get this up, through here, I'm gonna take this end and I'm gonna tape it on, there, and pull it through and over here. You can see, I've got my wire through. What you might have to do, is pop your carpet off on this corner. The whole underside of your dash is open. You have your box that runs up to all your vents and everything. If it feels like it's gettin' stuck, just reach under with your pull wire, pull it towards the back or towards the face of your dash, and it kind of comes up like this and you'll have plenty of room to pull this through. And we'll take the tape off of this side. We're gonna take this wire. Right along this edge, it's all open. Take it, we're gonna take it back, just like this. Just make sure you give it a second look, down in here, make sure it's not gonna hit any moving components. Is that clear, away from everything Now we can plug this into the back of our controller and get this mounted in place. Now we've got our plug on, we got our center piece put back, down in place. We can go ahead and snap our boot back into place and we can move on to mounting the control unit. Now, to mount this, we can mount this in any orientation. It can be upside-down, it can be turned, it can be sideways, however you want, which makes it nice 'cause we can put it up, underneath the dash. The only thing we don't want to do, is we don't want to zip-tie it to some factory wiring. We're gonna pull this panel off. We're just gonna grab the top corners and just work our way, down. Once we get that off, there's a bracket, here and then, right behind it, there's another bracket and it's just an aluminum bracket. What I'm gonna do, is on the back one, or the most forward one, I'm gonna take this couple self-tapping screws, I'm gonna mount it, right to that bracket. It stays hidden, up behind the dash, out of the way of the driver's feet and it's secured. Like that. Take this end. I'm gonna run it up, over top of that and it's gonna plug in, right in the back side here, right on the side, there. Now what we do, is we need to pop out this panel and this one. This one, we just pop it off, like that. We can pull this little rubber plug, out here and set it aside. We're gonna have a nut, right here. Use a 10-millimeter socket if you can't get it off with your fingers. Pull that off. You need to disconnect your wiring for your door. What you're gonna do, is you're gonna push up on that red tab, right down here, in the center, you're gonna push down and it's gonna release this white lever. Rotate that up, slide your plug out, slide that loop off of that hanger, and we're gonna pull this panel off. You just pull out. I won't be able to, can be held in a couple of places. You may have to pop the wiring off of the sidewall to get that out. Pull this panel out and set it aside. Our customer previously had a brake controller in here and they wanted to upgrade it 'cause they didn't like it, which is great 'cause the wiring's already ran. It's gonna be four wires on the back of the plug that goes into the main unit. You're gonna have a red one, it's gonna be marked, it's gonna say, "brake light." Blue one is for your brake output. White is gonna be your ground. Black is gonna be powered by the battery. Your red, it goes to your brake light, will go to your brake light switch, which, in this case, for this vehicle, we cannot tap into the factory brake light wire, so it would require or it does require a stop light switch. And, all that does, is mounts on the brake pedal arm and it has a plunger on it and, every time the brake pedal is pushed, that plunger comes out and that's what activates the brakes on your trailer. The brake output is gonna connect to the brake output wire, going to your seven-pole plug on the back of the vehicle. In our case, here, because it didn't have a tow package, it required an ETBC7. So, if your vehicle doesn't have a factory tow package, you're gonna need the ETBC7, in order to get a brake controller to work on a trailer. If you do have a factory tow package, your plug's gonna be right up in this corner, against your sidewall. The nice thing is, here, is that these wires, that we're on the previous brake controller, are already ran for us. And this red one goes up to my stop light switch or my brake light signal, which is gonna be the red wire on our plug. The black wire is running up to the positive side of the battery. The blue wire is our brake output, which is this white wire, here. You can see, it's got the blue wire on it. This is running back to our seven-pole plug, which is giving our brakes the signal on our trailer. And then, finally, we have our ground, which is gonna be this white wire, here. Our ground wire has to be grounded at the battery. To get all these wires outside of the vehicle, including the one coming from your brake light switch, it's going to the positive side of the battery because it has to be powered, also. Right underneath of this seat, your driver's seat, if you pull up your carpet, there, there's a little plug. Put a couple holes in it and you can take all these wires and feed them in. You can file the frame rail, either back to seven-pole plug or up, into your engine compartment and across, over to your battery. That's where your plug or your wires are gonna come out. Again, run them, follow the frame rail up, run right up the firewall, over the the negative and positive side of the battery. Your other wire, you run it out, you run it back to your seven-pole plug that's mounted on the back of the vehicle. So we'll plug our next plug into the side of our main unit, there, and take our wires. Let me get those routed so they're out of the way. And this is where I don't want to confuse you: White to white. We have two white wires. One of them was cut off with the blue wires so that's why we know that we're using this one. Blue to blue light. The power wire coming from or going to my battery from the old brake controller, I did disconnect it from the positive side of the battery. So you're gonna make sure you do that before you connect these 'cause it is fused. If you're doing this with the ETBC7, it is gonna have to be fused to the battery. So just make sure that you follow those instructions on, when you're running that power wire, up there and gettin' the fuse put on. The ETBC7 is gonna come with what you need. Do black to black. Then our red wire goes to the red wire coming from our switch. Now, before we put all our panels back in place, I'm gonna go ahead and hook the power back up to the battery, make sure we're getting power to our controller. Now what we're gonna do, is we're gonna push that and, hopefully, we see our LED light. There it is. So you can see how our light is changing blue to green. That means we need to calibrate it. We got our trailer hooked up, we're gonna go ahead and run through that again. Hit our brakes about 20 times, allow it to calibrate, and, once it goes to a solid color, it's been calibrated. When it goes from blinking green to blue or blue to green and it goes to solid blue, that means it's been calibrated and you're ready to go. That's gonna do it for look at an installation on the REDARC Tow-Pro Elite brake controller on a 2019 Jeep Wrangler..