Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2007 Cadillac Escalade
How to Install a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2007 Cadillac Escalade
Today on this 2007 Cadillac Escalade we are going to be installing Prodigy brake controller part number 90185. The first thing we want to do before we start installing the brake controller is to determine whether or not the vehicle has a factory installed tow package or not. On the Cadillac and Chevrolet vehicles you can tell this pretty easily. If your vehicle has a factory installed seven way plug at the rear. You can tell if it is a factory installed seven way by noting the GM symbol right on the front of the seven way plug. If your vehicle does not have this seven way there is a chance that you may not have the factory installed tow package and you may have to hard wire the Prodigy into your vehicle. 00:35
Now that we have determined that we do have the factory installed tow package we want to locate that. The wires we are looking for are actually located inside the cab below the steering column just left of the brake pedal. They are actually taped up to an existing wiring harness underneath the vehicle so they may be a little difficult to find. Now that we have got our wires located we just want to cut the tape that is holding them up and pull them down so they are easier to work on. As you can see we have got a red wire here which is our 12 volt hot lead for the brake controller. We have got the dark blue wire which is the outgoing wire from the brake controller back to the 7-pole plug. The white wire is the ground and the light blue wire with the white stripe is the brake switch lead. Now we can start wiring in our brake controller. 01:13
We are going to be using standard butt connectors to make these connections and there are four of them provided with your kit. We are going to want to hook the red wire here on the Cadillac to the black wire on our Prodigy harness. The darker blue wire we will hook to the darker blue wire on the harness. The white wire which is the ground will hook to the white wire on the harness. Then the light blue with the white stripe we are going to hook to the red wire on the Prodigy harness. Now that our connections are made I am just going to tape up the harness here. On this Escalade there is a nice rolled under lip on the bottom side of the dash that we can actually mount the bracket to. That is going to work pretty well. You do want to make sure when mounting the bracket that you mount it straight. We can not have it turned side to side. With the mounting bracket installed we can mount our Prodigy into place. We want to take the provided screws and then them into the threaded holes in the side of the Prodigy. Next we can route the harness up and over some of the components underneath the dash over to the Prodigy where we are going to plug it in. Take any of the remaining wire we may have left over and secure it up and out of the way using some cable ties. We can see now with the harness plugged in is that we still do not have any power to the Prodigy and that is because we have not finalized the tow package as of yet for the brake controller. To do that we need to go under the hood and connect a few wires there. 02:39
Now that we are up under the hood we want to locate the main accessory fuse block underneath the hood and you are going to find that on the driver side. We first want to remove the cover for the fuse block and you can see we have got the two studs at the front and these are the two power studs that are not only going to provide power for the brake controller but also for the hot lead at your 7-pole plug. The hot lead wire for the brake controller is located in between the fuse block and the body of the vehicle. You can see there is a red wire taped up with a ring terminal on it. That is the wire we are looking for. Route that to the front and it is going to connect to the far stud. Our 12 volt wire for our 7-pole at the rear is located on the inboard side of the fuse block connected to this orange wire. We want to untape that as well. Route it over to the front of the fuse block and connect it to the other stud. You are going to need to provide the two nuts for these two studs. The nut size we are going to need for this stud is an eight millimeter by 1.25. For this stud we need a six millimeter by 1.0. With that you just want to secure these wires up if need be so they are not going to be pinched anywhere. You can put the lid back on and do the fuse block and test the brake controller out. You can see with the power wire hooked up under the hood we have got two dots on the Prodigy and when we press the brake pedal we do not get anything. When we move the slide bar we get an NC which stands for no connection. That is telling we do not have a trailer hooked up. You can see when we have the trailer connected that we have a C indicated on the front which tells that we are connected. When we slide the bar over we are getting our full read out. That will conclude the installation of Prodigy wiring harness part number 90185 on a 2007 Cadillac Escalade.
Al
4/24/2022
instead of hard wiring in the controller does the vehicle not offer a plug in port? It did on my 2003 GMC Denali.