To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
The Tekonsha P3 is a brake controller beloved for its reliability and useability. You're able to save your settings and multiple profiles. It's easy to install, and with the custom harness, it's plug-and-play.
Features:
Specs:
Braking output 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.
Use the arrow buttons on the front of the module to set the output.
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 braking output. 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 P3 is able to store your settings in multiple profiles so that you can have them ready to go for different trailers and drivers. Even the display is super customizable: you can change the screen color, brightness, and language to make it easy to use.
The P3 makes it easy to troubleshoot problems as they come up, with comprehensible and detailed diagnostics displayed on the screen.
Diagnostic troubleshooting messages include:
Diagnostic warning signs include:
The Prodigy P3 offers advanced safety features to prevent damage to various components of your towing setup.
-Integrated reverse battery protection shields the brake controller and your trailer's breakaway system from shorts.
-When the P3 is not in use, it draws only 3.6 milliamps, minimizing 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.
Installing the P3 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 P3 must be horizontally level and parallel with the direction of travel to work correctly.
With a replacement wiring harness (sold separately) and replacement bracket (TK5906 - sold separately), you can even transfer the Prodigy P3 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 and trailer.
The Prodigy P3 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.
Today on this 2010 Nissan Frontier, we're going to review and install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller, part number 90195. To help us with our install on our brake controller we'll be using part number 5506. All right, this is what the P3 braking controller looks like once installed in our Nissan. We have 3 settings here that correspond to what size trailer, or how much weight you're pulling behind the truck. P1 for a small conventional truck and trailer. We hit this button here, go to boost level 2. You can see how that icon kind of changes to like a little fifth wheel.
Boost level 3 and it turns to a really big fifth wheeler gooseneck trailer. Then actually, one more time you turn the boost off and you get a typical small truck or a small trailer. With the boost setting on the brakes come on a little bit before the truck brakes come on, and it gives you the feeling of the trailer brakes are working first. It works for a very short time and then it works back to it's inertia activation, so when you lock the brakes, the brake controller locks the brakes at the same time. We also have an up and down arrow, to help set our power. The initial setup, it's a good idea to set it at about 6 or 7, and then adjust it from there, to whatever your trailer requires.
At anytime, if you need to activate the trailer brakes by themselves, all you have to do is move this manual override right here. Move it over to full power right here. Next, we will go ahead and show you how we install this brake controller. We'll go ahead and start with our part number 5506 first, our wiring kit. We will work with this and then work up to our brake controller. Let's go ahead and cover the parts that come with that.
We got 25 foot of cable right here, which is 10 gauge material with 2 wires inside a sheath. We got a variety of ring terminals here to connect with your battery and also a brake terminal to connect up to the circuit breakers. Now the circuit breakers you have will be 20, 30, and 40 amp. Pretty much in every situation you're going to use this kit on, your only going to use 2 and 3. It depends on which amp circuit breaker you need for your particular brake controller. It also includes 4 butt connectors to help hook up your wires. Now to give you an idea of what we're working with on our truck, our truck already has a 7 volt connector wired up to it for just lights alone, so we have our direct wire coming out from here, so we can hook up the rest of our wire harness too.
Now this one has a blue wire and a black wire. The blue wire is going to be used for output for the brake controller and our black wire we use for our 12 volt power supply going out to our trailer. Now on this connector, it makes everything pretty easy to connect to and convenient, however if you have a different style connector, the same principle applies, still look for blue for your trailer brake output and black for your 12 volt power supply. We'll go ahead and remove the sheath on our 2 wires here to get access to our wires here. One note, of course this is not going to be exact color match, we're still going to run ours black to black and then white to blue. Let's go ahead and strip back our wires and get them ready to install. Now let's get our other wires ready. Now the butt connectors, the insides been sitting out and corroded up a little bit, we'll go ahead and use the new butt connectors that come with the kit. Now I'm going to use some electrical tape to help protect our connections here. Now we'll go ahead and run our gray cable to the front of the vehicle. Just make sure you stay away from anything moving like the convention components, or anything hot like the exhaust. What we did in this case, is we ran our wire up along side the frame, over the hitch and up and over the top of the frame. It holds it tight to keep it up and out of the way, we went over these components and lines and hoses, just going over the top of it, ran it along down the side of the frame. There is a space between the frame and the gas tank and we just stuck it between there, over the bracket for the gas tank. Again, with all the frames, we tied them where we could. There happens to be a little opening right here, that we we're able to run our cable through, so that held it up for us. Then we ran it up towards the engine compartment. There is a little heat shield right here, that we will be able to sneak our cable through and hide it up and once we pull it from the top, it will take up all our slack and it will be hidden on the inside. None of our parts come with any zip ties like we're using here today, but you can use part number DW05726-25. Our Nissan here is pretty easy to push the wire up from the bottom and up into an opening right here where you can easily reach it. If it's a little bit harder to get to, you could use a pull wire, basically you could use any type material. We used an old piece of airline tubing, but a coat hanger or any piece of material that you can manipulate. Push down here and tie off and pull back up. We'll go ahead and pull up the slack. Make sure it's not interfering with anything on the engine and we'll go ahead and use another zip tie to hold it in place. We are just going to tie it to the vacuum line here and cut off the excess. Next, we'll go ahead and run our wire out to our power supply, which would be our battery. Let's go ahead and see how much length we'll need. We will follow the existing wire harness and hook it to the positive side of our battery. Next, we'll go ahead and find a location to install our circuit breakers. To help us with the installation, we're going to attach them using some self tapping screws. We'll be using part number 01131802. Now when we install our circuit breakers, it's a good idea to be as close to your power supply as possible and in this case we're going to use the sheet metal right here. Now we're always going to use a 40 amp circuit breaker for our 12 volt power supply for our trailer. In this case, our brake controller we're going to use a 30 amp circuit breaker. To install the screws, we're using a 1/4 inch nut driver. We will overlap it to the mounting tabs and use one screw to hold everything together. With our circuit breakers now on, we will have a better idea of where we're going to run our wires to through those and to our battery here. We will go ahead and cut off our excess. Next, we'll take a moment to split the wires apart, but we will go pretty far back on our wires and split them. Let's go ahead and put our white wire off to the side, eventually that will go inside the vehicle. Let's go ahead and work on our black wire. Now our 12 volt wire is going to go through our 40 amp circuit breaker, which is located right here. Pretty simple to install, we'll go ahead and cut the wire in half, strip them back and we'll install a couple of the small ring terminals. Our circuit breakers are actually labeled. This copper one is labeled BAT, the wire goes to the battery. This silver one is labeled AUX, so going to our battery, we'll go ahead and take our black wire and put it into place and let's install our hardware. Another wire going out to eventually our trailer, it will go on top. We can go ahead and snug those down using a 3/8 deep well socket. Now we'll take the other end of our wire and we'll go ahead and get it stripped back. We're going to attach one of the large ring terminals to it. This will eventually connect to the battery in this location right here. I like to leave the connection to the battery one of the last things I do, so I'll just leave this off to the side. Next up is go ahead and use our leftover length of wire and use that to run between our brake controller from the inside and out to our power supply once again. This will provide our ground and our power for the brake controller. However of course, whatever we have leftover is way too short for the job, so we'll have to use some additional wire. This will happen in situations where your battery is located on the passenger side of the vehicle. The extra wire we're going to be using is part number 10-2-1. This is a Deka 2 wire 10 gauge brake wire. Now we got an extra length of wire here, we're going to have about maybe a tenth of a chunk and we're going to combine it with our white wire here, it's separate and we're going to run that through the grommet to the inside of the vehicle. The grommet is going to be located in this corner right here. We will make a slit into that using a utility knife or actually a pocket knife works really good in this application. Just make a slit in there, just enough to where we can run our wires through. Just make sure we stay away from the wires on the side. I'm going to bundle my 3 wires together temporarily with some electrical tape and we'll push on through. I'll go ahead and push it in, chances are it's going to be hidden behind the insulation a little bit, on the inside of the vehicle. We'll go ahead and take our new cable here and follow a path for the original black cable. Then we'll see how much wire we need going through the circuit breakers and to our battery. Also this time, you'll need to accommodate for going to our power supply battery and also our ground, or negative side of the battery. We'll go ahead and cut off our excess one more time. We'll also take a few moments and go ahead and separate our wires, give us some working room. We will separate a small section here and get access to our black wire. Not let's go ahead and cut our black wire in half and we'll connect it up to our 30 amp circuit breaker, just like we did with our other wires. We'll go ahead and take 2 more small ring terminals and add it to our wires. One wire is going to our battery and will go to the copper side and your brake controller will go to the silver side of the circuit breaker. We'll cut our black wire off short, we don't need all that length and add our large ring terminal. We'll also do that to the white wire as well, but we'll leave it at it's original length. Once again, I'm going to leave my connections to the battery as the last thing I do, so let's tuck them out to the side for now. Now we will go ahead and take a moment to zip tie our wires up and bundle them up and keep them safe and secure and out of the way from the engine. I'm going to go ahead and cut them off even and strip back the wires. Now let's get our wires for our brake controller out. This is the wires that do come with the P3 brake controller. We'll go ahead and loosen them up and we'll use the supplied butt connectors that do come with the brake controller. Put the wire back and add our butt connectors. Now the brake controller comes with 2 small butt connectors, which isn't going to be enough for our white one, but our wiring kit does come with an extra butt connector that we can use for that purpose. The easy ones, black to black and white to white. Then our single white wire, we'll connect it to our blue wire. Now we have a single wire remaining, which is our red wire, this will connect up to the inaudible 00:13:04 sided brake switch, so when you hit your brake pedal, that turns on the brake lights and that's the circuit you want, so that will turn on our brake controller when it's needed. Now to tap onto our brakes on our truck, we're going to use a quick splice wire connector. We'll be using part number 564. Now on our Nissan, we're going to tap into the wire right behind one of our brake switches here. Follow our brake pedal up, we found out this yellow wire here is our brake signal, so we press the brake pedal, it gets hot. To use the quick splice connectors is pretty simple, just connect it over the wire that you want to use and then the wire you want to tap into or add to it you slide next to it. We are pretty tight up in there, so give me a moment, I'll have this hooked up and you can see what we did. Now you can see here my quick splice in place and our red wire sitting next to my yellow wire here and the quick splice is doing the job. Now I'll go ahead and find a place for our brake controller. The rules are pretty simple, basically you want to make sure you have it in an easy accessible area so you can manually activate it if you need it in an emergency situation. Make sure it's in a straight line with the vehicle and as little twist left to right as possible. You can install it up or down, you got 360 degrees of rotation to install it. If you want to you can install it this way, vertical and look down on it worked out better for you. In this case, I'm going to say we'll use this location right here, so it's easily accessible. Our mounting bracket consists of 2 pieces. We have this piece right here that gets bolted to the truck and then we have a secondary bracket, it attaches to this one with some screws and that holds the brake controller in place. It is also easy to remove the brake controller easily, if you want to transfer between different vehicles. If you want a permanent setup, you could also use this included metal bracket as well. Let's go ahead and put our small bracket in place with a Phillip's head screwdriver to run the screws in. Always double check and make sure there is nothing behind it before you run your screws in. Make sure it's straight where we want it and then we'll install the second screw. We'll go ahead and use machine screws that are also included with the brake controller as the rest of the hardware. Just push it in using a Phillip's screwdriver, we'll install the machine screws. This will cut their own threads into the plastic bracket. By the way, you can also use the screws that we used for our circuit breakers, they will work in the same place as well. A small stubby screwdriver works in a tight situation like this. Let's go ahead and take our wire harness, plug it into the back of the brake controller till it clicks and then these corners right here will go into the corners of the bracket and it will snap into place. Next, we'll take a few moments and zip tie our wires, once again making sure they are safe and secure and don't interfere when working with the pedals. I'll use a small piece of inaudible 00:16:25 material here, to help hide the color of the wires. You can also use electric tape to accomplish the same thing. Back under the hood, we'll go ahead and hook up our wires. Let's start with the positive side first. We'll loosen up this nut using a 12 millimeter socket. Let's put our 2 ring terminals on there and replace the nut. Now we will go over to the negative side of our battery and we'll use a 10 millimeter socket for that side. Let's go back to our brake controller and we've got the screen lit up, so that shows us we've got power. At this point, it's a good idea to go ahead and plug up the trailer and try it out. With the trailer hooked up, we can see the display changes and it shows a small icon of a truck and trailer. That will tell us we have good connection to our trailer brakes and all you got to do now it take it on a couple of test drives and adjust the brake controller to your liking. That will finish it for the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller, part number 90195 on this 2010 Nissan Frontier.
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