Upgraded Circuit Protected ModuLite with 4-Pole Flat, Hardwire Kit, and Circuit Tester

Video Transcript for Tekonsha Upgraded Circuit Protected ModuLite with 4 Pole Harness Installation

Today we're going to review and show a typical installation of the upgraded circuit protected ModuLite from Tow Ready, part number 119179KIT. This is a great wire harness to add to your vehicle where you need to pull a trailer. What's nice about this wire harness is it actually does protect the vehicle from a short on a trailer if it ever occurs. This wire harness here will work on a wide variety of different vehicles, whether it had incandescent lights or LED lights because There's a lot of versions out there that are a little bit different. In this case, in our Pontiac, this will work just fine with its incandescent lights. Let's go ahead and take a look at the wire harness. We stated earlier that this wire harness will protect the vehicle in cases of short on a trailer, how it does that is relatively simple. If you look here we have a nice thick, heavy red wire right here.

This wire actually gets power from the battery on your vehicle and then the rest of the wires picked up the signal from the car and then copies that signal going out to your trailer. It only copies the signal and uses the battery power to light up the trailer lights. If there's ever a short in the trailer, this module will take the brunt of it and protect your vehicle. This allows your trailer to be completely isolated from the wire harness on your vehicle. This module has been upgraded to work with vehicles using pulse width modulation wiring, allowing the converter to fully turn on, giving your trailer maximum brightness.

This will also work with multiplex wiring systems as well. Let's go ahead and cover the parts that come with the kit. This is our wire harness right here and it comes out with a four pole connector with a cap for it. To help find the correct wires on your vehicle, it does come with a very simple light tester here. It grounds to the bodywork and it pierces the wire or the end of a socket for testing wires. It comes with a butt connector to hook up to your power wire that goes up to your battery and also some quick-splice connectors.

A piece of adhesive right here to mount the module in a safe location and also a ground screw. Moving on to the next part would be our wire harness. This actually comes in two pieces. This little miniature kit here will actually run the power up to your battery, so we have a nice long length of wire here, about 20 foot. We have a couple of ring terminals depending on what kind of connection you need to make up at your battery, another butt connector, a ten amp fuse, and a fuse holder and some zip ties. Before we get to our install, a couple of quick notes. This does come with some quick-splice connectors right here which are great for attaching to wires that are inside the vehicle and relatively protected.

In this case we're going to connect to some wires that may be exposed to the elements. We're actually going to use a different type of connector for that. We're actually going to use some more heat shrink butt connectors. In place of those quick-splice connectors, we're actually going to use part number DW05744-5, from Deka. This is their heat shrink butt connectors for 16 and 14 gauge wires. To install our wire harness, we're going to need access to the wires behind the tail light. We've already got our tailgate opened up. For starters we need to remove these caps right here. I'm using a flat blade screwdriver to pop them loose. There the little slot in the bottom you can put a tool in and pop them loose. We'll do this on both sides of the vehicle. For these two fasteners, we use a 10mm socket. You can also use a phillips screwdriver. We have the light loose, to help break it free it may be a good idea to use a trim panel tool, this is the plastic wide wedge. Work it in there and try to work it back and forth until you can free it up. There's two little pins right here that the light snaps into. To make things easier, we'll go ahead and disassemble the tail light from the wire harness. We'll push down this tab right here and we can pull it apart. There. Next, well go ahead and remove this sheath right here for the wires. We'll eventually need access to them. We're done with our driver's side for now, we'll go ahead and repeat this same process over on our passenger side. When you install your module, a couple of things you want to keep in mind. Sometimes you can hide it behind the tail light, like this, if there's enough room. It's kind of rare, but sometimes you can. Sometimes you'll actually run your wires through a grommet and out to your wires and this will stay on the inside. You can use this hole to zip tie it to hold it in place or use adhesive or a sheet metal screw to attach it to some sheet metal on the inside. You will need an extra self-tapping screw for that purpose that doesn't come with the kit. Also, you can maybe run this down below and underneath and attach it. One thing you want to know when you install these, even though they are completely sealed, they work best with the wires hanging out down below. It eliminates any chance of any water seeping in around the wires. If you we're to use an adhesive here, you also want to make sure your area's completely clean. It's a good idea to wipe it down with a mix of water and rubbing alcohol on the module and your sheet metal. Then just attach the supplied adhesive. It's a double sided tape basically. You can use this inside or outside the vehicle. Now we'll go ahead and show a couple of suggestions for routing the four pole wire harness. In this case we've got ours ran down behind the bumper cover and out the bottom towards the hitch, which is a really typical application. It's really great for if you're going to use your trailer a lot and you need access to it all the time. It's a good thing to do it that way. Sometimes you may have your install of your module and your wires on the inside of the vehicle, which is equally great as well. If you need to use it, you just bring it from the inside and pull it to the outside. Then you run the rest of your wires down to your trailer. In this case, you can see how the door seal is thick enough, when you shut the hatch it won't hurt the wires. In this case on a hatch, or a trunk, as long as you have a rubber coating here, you can shut the hatch on it and it will be just fine. This red wire here will be connected up to the long length of black wire that comes with the kit. This will eventually be routed towards your battery. A couple of ways of doing it is just like your four pole wiring harness. You could run it out and down towards the bottom of the vehicle and up towards the front and towards your battery, or you may want to run it from the inside edge of your interior paneling up to the front and through the firewall and up to your battery, whatever feels more comfortable to you. Okay. Get your wire ready. A lot of times it comes stripped; you may have to redo it. We'll take our butt connector, crimp it, then we'll get our black wire ready. Eventually I'll be making multiple connections with some heat shrink butt connectors. I'll use the heat shrink as one of my last steps while I'm back here. Now let's take our black wire, route it out the bottom, just like our four pole. There's a lot of things for it to hang up on the inside, so it'll require a little bit of patience to run it through. Your white wire here has a ring terminal built into it, so this will go to ground on the vehicle. Typically any of the metal body work that you see will work just fine. If you can, run your ground screw to where two pieces of metal overlap, that gives it a little bit more for a screw to bite into, and a little bit less chance of stripping it out and making the hole to big and starting over. For our wires here, our red, yellow, brown, and green wires. We're going to need to use our light testers. We need to find the right functions that match up. In this case, this part here will go to ground, that little clamp. If you can, attach a ground wire first so it can do double duty for testing. Instead of piercing the wires, use the end of the connector here and very gently use it as a probe to find out what circuit you want. Sometimes you'll test the vehicle and you know that the turn signal is working, but since you have the light disconnected from it, the computer on the car thinks the bulb is out, so it will turn off the circuit. Well, in that case, if you run into that, then you have to plug everything back in together and then, yes, you will have to use your tester and pierce the wire. Be very careful, just barely touch it and pierce the wire. We found our circuit. This is our left turn signal here. On our wire harness our yellow wire will go to our left turn. Now we'll go ahead and show you how to use a quick splice connector. You're going to slide your wire over the wire you want to tap in to. It'll fit on one track here. Then we'll take our second wire, run it into the second track. Push it through till it's flush and then you want to use some pliers to push the metal clip that'll go through the insulation and make contact for both wires. Then you slide your cap over. Our brown wire is going to be our running light circuit. You want to look for a signal that goes through the wires that only comes on when you turn on your headlights or your running lights. Our red wire goes to our stop light circuit. Whenever your vehicle has a separate stop light circuit, separate from the turn signals, you want to use this wire. If I didn't have to use this, I would add a separate ring terminal to this and just combine it with that ground right there. In this case, we'll go ahead and make another connection to our brake wire. Next, we'll go ahead and use the heat gun to shrink the connections. You can use the lighter, however you run the risk of damaging the connector if you put too much heat on there too soon. It's always a good idea to use a proper heat gun. Our green wire here has to be ran over to the passenger side of the vehicle. A couple of different ways of doing it. You could run it below, underneath the bumper cover, and around and back up. You'll probably run out of a little bit of wire, and it's not uncommon to actually extend this to make it go where you need to go. We could also pull back the bumper cover a little bit right here, and we could probably tuck it in behind here and we might have just enough to reach over there. For our particular vehicle, we're going to go ahead and run it underneath the bumper cover. We'll pop off the cap from this fastener, there will be one on each side, and using a 10mm socket we're going to go ahead and remove it and loosen it up. Now we can take our wire and tuck it in. We can tuck it in and make sure it doesn't get pinched. I'm just going to lay it across for now and then we can use our trim panel tool to help push it into place. I'm just using a trim panel tool, but anything wide which you can work it into place will work. Once you're satisfied with the routing of the wire, we'll go ahead and reinstall the fasteners. Now when we checked for our right turn signal on our vehicle, we found out this is all green wire, so it was a nice match up for a green to green on our passenger side. With all our electrical connections made behind the tail lights, we can go ahead and reinstall our tail lights. Make sure your connection plugs in securely and it clicks, and we'll put everything back together. Pop them back in place and reinstall the hardware. With all the hardware back in, then we're going to go ahead and reinstall all of our caps. Depending on your vehicle, if you ran your four pole wire harness on the outside, you just want to keep away from the exhaust and hid it behind the bumper cover as best as possible. Then run it down to the center of your hitch so you have easy access to it for your trailer. If you ran your four pole wire on the inside of the vehicle, you could simply keep it with the jack storage compartment until you needed to use it. I've just got the end sticking out for now but you can hide it totally inside when you're not using it. Another option is storing it with the spare tire area. When you need to use it you can simply pull it out and generally there's enough clearance for your wire so it won't get scraped up or damaged. Again, when you don't need it, you can just keep it with the spare tire. The advantage of keeping it on the inside is that your four pole connector is protected from the elements and it won't corrode up, and it will last a lot longer than one that sits outside of the vehicle. When you are ready to use it, you shut your hatch on it and there's plenty of room for it to move if you need to pull any out. When you run your wire up to the battery you want to make sure you stay away from anything moving, like suspension components, or anything hot, like the exhaust. It's a good idea to follow existing lines that are underneath the vehicle so you have something to zip tie to. Then you run this back up towards your battery from the engine compartment. Alternately, if you ran your wire on the inside of the vehicle, you could hide this underneath the panels and find a grommet on the firewall to run the wire to the outside. Whichever you prefer. To pull the wire from the bottom to the top we're going to need a pull wire. In this case I'm using an old piece of airline tubing but any piece of material that you can run down there, such as a good-old coat hanger, or I wonder if you could use a tape measure, something just to guide it down. Just make sure you stay away from moving components, again, or anything hot like the exhaust or steering components. Just run it down towards the bottom. If you can see the ground from on top and aim for that, you should be okay. Whatever fashion you use, just make sure you attack your wire to your pull wire. Make sure it's secure and then just pull it back up in position. With our wire pulled up, we'll go ahead and zip tie off to something that's convenient to help hold it in place and keep it from falling back down. By the way, I ran out of zip ties, already, that came with the original package. It's always a good idea to get some extra zip ties anytime you do some electrical. If you need any extra zip ties, you can use part number DW05726-10 from Deka. Now we'll go ahead and hook our fuse holder to our black wire that we just previously ran. It does come with a regular butt connector for that purpose, however I'm going to make another substitution using part number DW05745-5 Deka heat shrink butt connector for 12 and 10 gauge wires. When you hook this up to your power supply, typically you're going to go to the battery, however, in some situations, like this vehicle here, the battery is actually buried under another component. If you can, look and see if you can find another power wire that goes to the junction box. If that's straight off of the battery, you can hook up directly to that. On our install here, we're going to use this post that comes directly off the battery, since it's covered up by another component. I'm going to just cut it short and then I'll add my fuse holder. We'll let that sit for now. Let's strip the wires back and we'll add our heat shrink butt connectors since this is kind of outside. Now we'll take our fuse holder, cut it in half, strip the wires back before and hook up to our butt connector. Now other side, we'll go ahead and strip back the wire and we'll go ahead and add our ring terminal. The kit does come with two different sized ring terminals. Typically the smaller one you're going to use most of the time, but whatever works. Once again, since we're wiring on the outside of the vehicle, we're going to make a substitution. We're going to use part number DW05741-1; this is the Deka ring terminal, it's a heat shrink, and it's designed for 10 to 12 gauge wires also. We'll put our butt connector over the end here. It's sealed off at the front here, which is nice. Push the wire as far we can, we'll crimp in this location. Then we'll use a heat gun to shrink both of them and make our attachment to our power supply. Now I'll take our ten amp fuse that comes with the kit, put in in our fuse holder, and then we'll go ahead and zip tie our wire one more time to keep it safe and secure and out of the way. With our fuse in place, everything is electrically connected. Let's go ahead and try it out. We'll use the tester that came with the kit. We'll take our clamp, put it to the ground wire, which is white, and then we'll check our brown wire for our running light circuit. We turn on our running lights or our headlights and we've got a signal there. Now we'll turn on the left turn signal. Okay. That would be our yellow wire. Then green for our right turn signal. Okay. Then we'll check our brake signal, which will be a constant signal on the yellow and green wires. All right, looks like everything works. That'll finish it for our upgraded circuit protected ModuLite, part number 119179KIT, from Tow Ready.