Curt Push-To-Test Trailer Breakaway Kit with Built-In Battery Charger - Top Load

Video Transcript for Curt Push-To-Test Trailer Breakaway Kit Review

Today we're going to be taking a look at the Curt Push-to-Test Trailer Breakaway Kit with built-in battery charging. Now the Curt breakaway kit is going to give us everything we need to stay in compliance with all of our local laws. We've got our battery box. It has all the wiring inside of it that we'll need to connect. You also see here, push-to-test, so we can push that button and test the power level we have in our battery. And we're going to have our breakaway switch.

Basically what this does is we'll have power going to this switch, and if the plug is pulled out, so if your trailer separates from your truck, we've got this connected to the truck, it pulls this plunger. Once the plunger is out, that power is going to loop around and it's going to go right out to the brakes on your trailer. That way the brakes will be applied. It's going to slow your trailer down safely. That way it'll minimize any damage that might occur.Now this needs to connect to, of course, our brake signal, but also to our 12-volt signal coming in from our truck, and our ground.

Those connections, we're going to make in our junction box. You can see here the three wires that the old connector, the old harness breakaway kit was connected to. Just let those down for now. I want to get my breakaway switch mounted and my box mounted, so we'll start by doing that. They do provide us with self-tapping screws.

The two smaller ones are going to be for your ground, if needed, to mount your breakaway switch if needed, and then the four longer ones are going to be for our box. Now our old breakaway switch was mounted right here on the stud. When they built the trailer they put a stud on there thinking about a breakaway switch, so we're just going to utilize that. If yours doesn't have this kind of setup, then just use one of those self-tappers to get it secured.Now, of course, wherever we choose to mount our breakaway battery box, we want to ensure that we can open the lid here. That's going to allow us to get to the battery if we ever need to maintain it or anything like that.

That's what they mean by the top load design. It fits in from the top. It looks like it'll mount right here really well. See if fits right on that plate for us That's going to be where we put ours. To install it, we're going to use the self-tapping screws. You'll need a five-sixteenths inch bit driver. We'll get it positioned where we want it.Now, with that hole started, just take a self-tapper. Just going to start it a little bit to give it some support there. It will kind of help us hold everything in place. To get it level, we'll mark our hole locations. Just use a little pick or a small screwdriver. We'll pull that back off and we can get those holes started. Now with our four holes pre-drilled, we're ready to get our breakaway kit mounted here. Now, generally with a self-tapping screw, you really don't have to drill these out beforehand, but this frame on this trailer is really thick, and generally that causes them to break. So if yours is the same situation, pre-drill them and save yourself a headache.Now that the component's mounted, let's open up the top of our box. The white wire needs to go to our trailer ground. There's a little passageway right down here, so if we place the wire down, you can see it come out down below here. Bring that down. Our yellow wire is going to go to the positive from our trailer, which would be the 12-volt from our truck. And then one side of our breakaway switch we're going to run in there, and we're going to use the side that has the spade terminal already connected to it. I'm going to wrap this just like that so I can zip tie it to my original wiring there.All right, it looks good on your length. That's the one that has the spade connector on it, a little bit of a turn in that, and this one needs to go up and in. This is going to go to the positive side of our breakaway battery, just like this one. So we'll have two spade connectors we need to get on one connection there. We've got a splitter here. It allows us to connect two of these to one, so we'll slide both of those on. The black with the terminal from the breakaway, the red from our control top there. And that'll be slid right on, just like that. Black one here needs to go on the black connector, on the black battery terminal. Just like that. Now before I get everything connected, I want to use the zip ties to get this secured where I want it so I know what kind of lengths that I'm working with.All right, so we just trimmed our white wire coming out of our breakaway kit, which needs to go to ground, and our ground wire. Now yours isn't always going to be white, but you do want it to go to ground. Now we're ready to start making our connections. The white wire needs to go to ground, so we need to ground that to our trailer or a junction box. We're using part number DW05744 here, it'll be a Heat Shrink Butt Connector. We're going to heat this up. As we heat it up it kind of turns clear. Just light heat, we don't need to really overheat it any. Just slowly give it time and you'll see it's going to shrink down there. Once it gets fully shrank, you can see it looks like that wire gets bigger, almost like it magnifies it. And then there's just this little bit of clear gel that comes out of the end. We'll do that on both sides.Now, the black wire that comes back from our breakaway switch needs to go to the brake wire on our trailer. This happens to be our brake wire. Let's get that shortened up and stripped. Now for these, since these wires are generally a little bit bigger, we're going to use part number DW05745, but they're going to work exactly the same way. The last thing we've got here is going to be the 12-volt power that comes in from our vehicle. That's what we're going to use to charge the battery. I probably already said that. We're gonna use the same style butt connector to get that connection made, and that's going to go to the yellow wire coming out of the breakaway kit. Since we're putting a little bit thinner wire in a little bit larger butt connector, you can see I doubled that up. That'll give us plenty to grab a hold of there.All right, we'll shrink that one down and we'll be ready to test it out. If you'd like, you can use a little bit of tape or some wire loom, just get everything wrapped up, but that's really optional. It's just more for looks than anything else. Now, to test the breakaway kit, first let's plug it into our power source, and we'll want to see one of the lights come on. Generally, you're going to have the orange charging light. That means it's receiving 12-volt from our truck or our tester, and it's charging our battery. We also have the option to push to test. You can see green's coming on indicating that it is charged. That's probably just finishing off that last little bit, just to top it off. If this light comes on, that's going to indicate a low battery situation. That's going to indicate to you that your breaks probably aren't going to work in the event of a breakaway, so you need to get that charged up by hooking it up to your tow vehicle.Now to test out the system, we're going to have someone spin the tire for us. We'll pull out our switch. That should instantly stop those tires, the brakes should apply, and then we'll want to ensure that when we put this back in that they release. Now we're going to spin that tire and have that switch pulled up front. You'll see just like that it gets those brakes applied. Now we'll have it put back in. We want to make sure it's back free again. Okay. One more time. Back in. Perfect. And that's going to complete our look at the Curt Push-to-Test Trailer Breakaway Kit.