Video Transcript for Tekonsha T-One Vehicle Wiring Harness Installation - 2020 Jeep Cherokee

Ryan: Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2020 Jeep Cherokee, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Tekonsha T-One vehicle wiring harness. Many of our Jeep customers use their Cherokees to do a little bit of everything, whether it be towing a trailer using wide up accessories or really anything in between. And that's where our wiring is going to come into play. It's going to provide us with the necessary lighting functions, not only to remain safe, but legal as well. And since our customers use those accessories and tow quite often, it's really nice that the wiring is able to be mounted outside of the vehicle here.

I do want to mention, I did have to use a bracket to mount it like this. It's not included, but you can pick it up here at etrailer, but if you don't want to use a bracket, you can actually use the cap to secure the wiring to your safety chain loop on your hitch.Honestly, I prefer the bracket a little bit better, kind of gives us a cleaner look and makes it really easy to use. Since it will be mounted outside, it's important that you have a thick rubber dust cap to help keep those terminals protected from the elements. That way it'll last a long time. What I do recommend going a step further and from time and time again, to put some dielectric grease on the terminals as well.

And that'll just really do a great job of preventing any corrosion issues. I will say the wiring is really well-made, it's put together nicely. And I really liked the fact that it uses a module box. What that module box is going to do is protect your Jeep's factory wiring, if a short or anything like that we're to occur on the trailer side. And that's really important with today's newer vehicles and they have really advanced and complicated electrical systems, and you wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that.Since this uses that module box.

That's one less thing we're going to have to worry about. At the end of the day, the wiring is going to give you a little more peace of mind and make you feel safer as you're pulling your trailer down the road. Now, as far as the installation goes, it's really not bad. For the most part it's just going to plug right into the factory wiring. And that's the easy part really.

The most time consuming part is this having to run your power wire up into the engine compartment, but it's really not too bad. As long as you take your time, you should have no issues getting it done at home in the garage, or maybe even in the driveway. Speaking of which let's go ahead and do that together now.To begin our install. We're going to be here at the back of our Jeep and we're going to need to remove the taillights. What we'll do is open up our hatch and if you move to our taillight, you're going to see two fasteners. I'm going to use a T30 Torx bit to pull those out. Once you have them removed, you're able to just grab the light, kind of work it side to side and pull back, once we have it out, we can unplug it. This connector here, there's going to be a red tab, push that back. And then there's going to be a black tab there in the center, push down on it and pull the plug apart. I'll just set my taillight off to the side and repeat the same process over on the other side of our Jeep.What we can do now is grab our new wiring harness and we're going to take the T-connector side with the yellow, brown and red wires and plug it into our factory taillight connector. We'll take the corresponding end of our T-connector. These only gone one way, so you can't mix them up. That just plugs in, push down the red tab again. And from there, we're going to take the rest of our wiring and feed it down in through this pocket to get it to come out of the bottom of our Jeep. I found it makes it a little easier if you do this one at a time, as opposed to trying to jam the whole harness down there, trying to get these going. And we're even going to take our box and feed that down as well. Once we have it all dropped down, we're able to grab our tail light and plug that back in to the other end of our T-connector there. I'll just push into place and tuck our wires down. And re-install the light, the opposite way that we removed it.The light will just pop back in and we'll use that same hardware to re-secure it. So just a tech tip before we go underneath the car, eventually we are going to have to bring the passenger side T-connector wiring up into the passenger taillight pocket here. To prevent us from having to get up and down, I'm going to use a pull wire. It's just a piece of tubing. You could use a piece of heavy gauge wire, coat hanger or something like that, but we're just going to feed this down this pocket. That way, whenever we're underneath and we go to get our T-connector up over here, we can just tape the connector to the full wire, come back up and pull it right up where we need it to be. This safes us little time and energy in the long run. Underneath the Jeep now, here's where our wiring came down. And what I'm going to do is route our four way flat connector over to our hitch, where we're going to mount it and route the passenger side T-connector to the pull wire that we just put in.So we can bring that up. I'll go ahead and do that and then show you the path that I took to get these there. This is how I did our four way flat wiring. Now I'm just loosely securing everything. We'll wait until we have everything hooked up. Until we really secure all our wiring and keep it up and out of the way and look good. With that being said, my four way flat connector, I just ran it right over here, zip tied it to the hitch. And now what I'm going to do is use a mounting bracket to secure our four way flat connector from the outside of her Jeep. What I found that works out really good and gives us a really clean look. If you use a four way flat bracket, just like this, one of the holes I had to enlarge just a little bit. What I'm going to do is take out this bolt right here using a 10 millimeter socket.You can take that bolt, put it through our bracket and back in place. That gives us a really perfect mounting point. We'll just take our connector, slide it through and cap the end. As far as our T-connector, that runs over to the passenger side, you can see the green and red wire there. What I did was just run it behind this little panel here, so it goes behind our bumper, I just pushed it straight through there. You can see this is where it comes out the other side. And from there, I simply just took that T-connector and taped it to our pull wire. Now we can go back up top, pull up on our wire and get this connected. Back up top, we'll grab our pull wire and work our connector up. Go ahead and just pull that tape off. Let me get it disconnected here. But this is going to work the same as the driver's side.Pretty straightforward. Let's take our connector and try to get all that slack out of it, if he can. One end of the connector plugs into that factory plug. Then the other end, we'll simply just go into our tail light. Now we can just, re-install the tail light the same way we removed it. Get it lined up and put back in. Now, when you're reinstalling these taillights, you want to make sure that you're not pinching any of those wires or anything like that, that we just connected. I went ahead and just secured up that wiring using some zip ties to keep it up and out of the way of everything. And while I was at it, I also secured our module box here. This was pretty easy. There was this little piece of metal here that had a couple of holes in it already. And so again, I just use a zip tie to secure the box to that piece of metal. With that being said, we can now grab the white wire. It's going to have that pre-attached ring terminal, and we're going to need to ground this out to the body of our Jeep.Now right here on the frame, nice, clean, solid piece of steel that'll work perfect for ground. I'm going to hold the ring terminal there, take the included self-tapping screw and get that secured. Now we can grab the black power wire coming out of our module box. And what we're going to do is take one of the included heat shrink butt connectors. That'll slide over the bare end there. Take a pair crimps, pinch it down. The other end of the butt connector, what we're going to do is take the large bundle of black power wire that's included with the kit. Going to take one end of it, put into the other end of the butt connector and crimp that down as well. Since these are heat shrink butt connectors, what I'm going to do is take our heat source and seal up the ends. Now that our butt connector is shrink down, I've just secured our wiring right here. And what we need to do is run this black power wire up into the engine compartment.I went ahead and did that, and this is a path that I took. I just followed it back, up and around through here. And whenever you're doing this, do your best to avoid any hot or moving parts. I actually just ran it on top of our sub frame so it's on top of that piece of metal, you can see I had zip ties there, securing it up there. And it just drops down right through here. Now this plastic panel, you don't have to take this off. If you want to, to give you a little more room, there's this a handful of bolts that you can pull out to lower it down. Here's our power wire. I just followed our brake lines.You can see it there, keep it secure along the way. I zip tied it about every foot or so. And then right here, I followed those brake lines up into the engine compartment. Now, the way I got our pull wire up there, I'm sorry, our power wire up there is by using a pull wire, just how we did for that passenger side taillight. I popped the hood, dropped that pull wire down, tape down our power wire and pull it up into the engine compartment. Now under the hood, here's where our power wire ended up coming through. We'll just let this hang here for a second. And what we're going to do is take our fuse holder and get that ready to attach to the power wire. First thing you want to do open it up, make sure the fuse is not installed. We'll put that in at the very end. We're going to cut it in half, strip back the insulation on each end.I like to twist the wires, gives us a nice connection. One end of the fuse holder is going to receive the ring terminal and we'll crimp it down. The other end will receive a heat shrink butt connector, crimp that on as well. We can take our power wire, eyeball the length of it here. So our ring terminal is going to get connected to the positive battery. I'll give us a little extra slack here in the power wire. I'll trim some of it off. Strip this end back as well. This is going to plug right into that butt connector, slide it in, crimp it down. Then again, we can come back with our heat source to seal up the ends. That all sealed up, we can take our ring terminal and get it connected. If you look at the positive battery terminal right here, there's going to be a 10 millimeter nut.We're going to remove that nut, we're going to slide on that ring terminal, and then simply just tighten that nut back down. Once it's tight, you can go back to your fuse holder itself, take the included fuse and push it into place. With everything hooked up it's a good idea to test our wiring to make sure it's working properly. I'll go ahead and turn on our running lights. We'll try our brake lights, our left turn and our right turn. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Tekonsha T-One vehicle wiring harness on our 2020 Jeep Cherokee..