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.
Speaker 1: Today in our 2017 Chevrolet Colorado, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Tekonsha Primus IQ trailer brake controller for one to three axles, part number TK90160. So here's where our Primus IQ looks like when it's fully installed. Now it is a proportional brake controller, which means it's gonna apply our trailer brakes in the same intensity and at the same time that we apply the brakes in our vehicle. Now what our trailer brake controller is going to do is it's going to take the signal from our brake pedal, so when we press on it, it's gonna take that signal, following the wires, and it's gonna send it out to 7-way at the back, and it's gonna send the proper signal from the back of our 7-way to our trailer to our brakes and have the proper signal, and the right adjustments of everything.Now the CR brake controller is going to let us know that the brake controller senses that the trailer is connected so just a quick glance down, we can know if we're connected properly or if there's any issues at the back. The button on top here is going to be for our boost setting, and we're gonna have three different boost settings. It's gonna be off, one, two, and three.
What the boost setting is going to do is it increasingly is going to start out with a higher breaking percentage, ramping up and ramping up quicker. So if you're on boost three, it's gonna ramp up quicker. Now the lower we have our boost setting, obviously the lower it's gonna be and if it's at zero, or boost off, it's gonna start at zero and slowly go up. Now if we do have our boost on, all we have to is glance down, and that second dot is going to show up letting us know that boost level is on.Now we're gonna be able to mount our brake controller all the way straight up and down or facing down and anywhere in between. We just want to make sure that it's nice and level and going in the direction of travel with the vehicle.
Our brake controller is going to automatically acquire the proper level setting, and it's even gonna adjust when we're traveling up and down hills. The Primus IQ is even going give us proportional braking in reverse. Now if you want to cancel the boost and hold it off without having to cycle it through, we can actually press on the brake pedal, and then hold the boost button down for approximately five seconds, and an R will show up, canceling the boost out for a total of three minutes so that we can back our trailer up into tight spots without having to worry about the boost setting coming into play and causing a lot of jerking motion. This'll cancel out and turn back off and go to the original setting after three minutes.Now the really nice think I like about the proportional style brake controllers over the time delay is that the time delay is going to send the power out regardless if you're moving or not and even if you're at a stoplight holding on the brakes, it's going to send that maximum power out to your trailer brakes causing some more strain and wearing them down whereas if I push the brake in here it knows that we're not moving because there's an inertial sensor inside so it's not going to send any out. Well then after a few seconds at a stoplight, it is going to send out a portion of the maximum power to our brakes just to hold the vehicle still and hold the trailer nice and steady.
Now that we've seen it, we've gone over some of the features, let's show you how to get it installed.To begin our installation we're going to need to come to the driver's side threshold right here. We're going to remove this panel to expose the wires for our brake controller. I'm just going to take a trim panel tool. We're going to come up underneath the panel and pry it up. It should release the clip so we can pop it out.
You're just going to want to work your way across putting pressure to pop it out. Grab underneath and behind the panel if you need to. Then we can pull the panel out.Now the wires we're going to be looking for are going to be taped to this harness right here so we can go ahead and cut that tape away. Make sure those are the wires we need. Now we're going to need to test each one of our wires here to see what they do. Now our black is going to be our ground and our red wire with the green stripe on it should be our power signal. I'm going to go ahead and take a circuit tester and make sure that I'm getting a constant 12 volts to it. So we can see that I'm getting constant power there so that's going to be my power.Now the white wire with the blue stripe should be our brake signal and we should only get power to it when the brake pedal is depressed. So we can see that we're not getting any power now, but if I press on the brake pedal, that's going to be our output for the cold side of our brake switch.The last wire here is going to be the output from our brake controller that's going to send the signal to our 7-way in the back.So now that we've identified the wires and we know each function, I'm going to go ahead and cut some of this away so I can get my wire up higher so I can have a little bit more room to work and chose a nice spot for my brake controller.You just want to be careful when you're cutting the tape back. You don't want to cut any of the wires inside and cause any shorts and once you have a little bit more to work with, you can go ahead and cut off the excess tape. Now we're going to be cutting off the ends of the heat shrink that's on our wires here and we're going to strip them all back.Now that we have our wires striped back, you're going to want to grab your brake controller harness and we're going to be making our connections. Now, we're going to need to pick up some butt connectors and I got some heat shrink butt connectors just to help out with some protecting our wires and keeping the moisture out and hopefully keeping corrosion buildup from happening. Now if you need some of these, you can pick some up on our website using part number DW05744-5 and that will be for a package of five.We can go ahead and start with our white wire that's on our harness. That's going to be for our ground. We can go ahead and slip the wire in and crimp it in place. Since it's for our ground, we can take our black wire coming out of our vehicle and connect it to the other end. Now we can take our blue wire, which is going to be the output signal, put a butt connector in place and that's going to go to the other blue wire coming from our vehicle.Now for our power, our power's going to be coming off of the black wire off of our harness. If you remember when we we're testing, that's going to be the red wire with the stripe on it. We have one more wire left and that's going to be our red wire coming off of our harness. That's going to be for the brake signal. So we're going to be attaching that to the white wire with the blue stripe.I'm going to be using a heat gun to shrink down my connectors. I just want to mention if you are using an open flame or a torch, a lighter, anything like that, you want to be extra careful not to burn the connectors or the wire itself.Now we need to find a location to mount our brake controller. Now the only stipulation there is, is we want to make sure it's nice and level and it's in the direction of travel with our vehicle. Now seeing how short the wires are, right here, right underneath our light switch would be a good location because it's not going to interfere with our hood prop and we'll still be able to have access to our diagnostic port. We can take our bracket and it does come with more than one. If you want to use the traditional style mounting bracket you can, but we're going to be using the clip-on style bracket instead. We're just going to take two of the provided screws and screw them into the dash. I just want to mention, you want to make sure that there's nothing back there that the screws might damage any wiring or anything like that. Quarter inch nut driver and put it into place. I want to get the first one started, make sure my bracket is nice and level and then we can get the second one put in place.Now on the back of our brake controller, we can take our harness, plug it in, we can see that it's turning on letting us know that it's not connected to a trailer. Now we can take our brake controller, slide it into the pocket and lock it into place.Then take a little bit of a half inch wire loom, just so you don't have those wires sticking out underneath my brake controller, tidy things up a little bit. If you need some and you want to use it in your application, you can pick some up on our website using part number 459075-1 and that's going to be half inch loom by the foot. Now one foot should be plenty. This may be a little bit more. We only really need a few inches of it.I'm just going to take the loom, open it up, and start sliding my wires in. Then I can cut off the excess. You can come back with a little bit of electrical tape to keep our loom in place and to hide any of the little bit of wire that's still showing. We can go ahead and put our panel back in place. I just want to line up the clips and lock it in and you can come back and make sure the weather stripping is on the correct side. You're just going to work your way down pressing the panel back into place.So I got my tester hooked up so we can make sure that all the functions are working properly so we're going to go ahead and run through our lights and these two meters up here, when we apply the brakes, it'll show the voltage and amperage coming out making sure our braking controller is sending the correct signal.So here you can see we have our clearance lights, left turn signal, right turn signal, as well as the brakes. If you watch the meter up top, we can see that the brakes are being applied and that meters going up letting us know that the brake controller is sending the correct signal out.As that will finish up our look at the Tekonsha Primus IQ trailer brake controller for one to three axles, part number TK90160, on our 2017 Chevrolet Colorado.
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
Ordered as replacement for one that quit after 18 years. New plugged into existing wiring and even fits in existing mounting bracket. So far so good.
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
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