Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan Part 2
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How to Install a Brake Controller for a Trailer on a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan Part 2
To get to the engine compartment, we are going to drill out a hole right here, between this grommet and this smaller grommet up here. We are going to start off with a 1/4 inch and work our way up so we can install our bushing, which will end up right in there. Be careful of the wires right next door. Once you have your holes drilled out, you can go ahead and insert your bushing of your choice. And at this point you can take the extra wire that you had and wire going to the brake controller going out to the connector you can run those through right now. We are going to run outside our blue wire going out to our trailer, our white wire is going to go to ground, and our black wire will eventually go to our power. To give yourself a good idea about how much wire to leave left over behind so you have enough to reach the brake controller when you install it and it is always a good idea to have a little bit extra on the inside. So we will push a little back in there towards the outside. 1:05
And our red wire, we are going to leave that to connect up to cold side of the brake switch right here. As you can see here, we pulled the three wires to the outside now. Just give you an extra note, we pulled these a little farther than we needed to, so what we are going to do is actually use some of this excess wire here. So go back towards the fire wall so we will still have plenty of extra wire for the brake controller. First, we will start off with the white wire that was going out to the back to the trailer and to say it again this is going to go to the blue wire. So we are going to go ahead and just cut them even and we are going to connect these two together and we will not have to worry about that one circuit anymore. And to keep from getting confused it is always best to do one circuit at a time. So, now we have got the two wires going to the brake controller, power and ground. Now the extra wire that we had left over. All right, next what we are going to do is we are going to deal with the black wire right here. We are going to put a ring terminal on it and put it on its own circuit breaker right here. Right now would be a good idea to pull back the wire harness underneath the dash to make sure you have enough length just in case you might need to add some or not. We pulled it back into the cab and it looks like we have enough room to go directly to our circuit breaker and not have to add anything, but you can always use the extra wire to add length if you need it. A little bit longer. 2:27
Now, our next wire is going to be the ground wire for the brake controller. We will extend that to go around the battery and hook up to the negative terminal. With our ground wire, we will go ahead and put a butt connector on to that. And we will run that back behind the battery, follow the cable around. See how much length we need and we will cut it off right there and add our ring terminal. Okay, and also we are going to leave this loose for now also. We will save this for last. So, we will just tuck that out of the way and then we will pull our harness back into the cab again just double check ourselves make sure enough length is going into it. Coming from the circuit breaker to the battery to its power supply we will need to run another wire. Again, this is left over wire from what we had before. Again, we will just do the same thing, we will make a jumper going out to the battery. Okay, and with that we can go back underneath the cab of the vehicle and start installing the brake controller. 3:53
Next, we need to find where the brake is coming off of the switch, we want to find the wire that only comes on when you hit the brake petal. If you follow the brake switch, it goes up and around this harness here and it looks like it comes back down in to here. So, it might be a good idea to look for the brake signal in these wires here. All right, once you get the wires rolled back to the brake switch you can start testing the them to see which one does what. All right, and also what you want to check is to make sure that it only comes on when you hit your brake pedal and not with the turn signals. All right and make sure that you have the white wire. All right, we will splice our white wire coming from the brake controller. And then we will double check our connection. Okay, we are good to go. 5:17
All right, now we will install the brake controller onto the dash. Okay, we will mount our brake controller onto the bottom of the dash here at the very edge and there is a nice flat spot where we can install it, so we will do that right there. It is a good idea to put it along a nice straight edge, so you can put that along that and then install our screws. All right, we will snap our plug into the back of the brake controller. And the last step inside the vehicle is to go ahead and zip tie the wires up and out of the way. All right, we are back to the battery and we will go ahead and make our final connections. First, we will disconnect the ground. Okay, and then we will disconnect the positive. We will go ahead and hook up all of our positives together. Reconnect those. Reconnect our ground. Make sure that all of our connections are secure. Okay, and one more zip tie right there. All right, and all that remains is go ahead and test the brake controller out on our trailer or tester and you are done. All right, and that concludes our install of part number 90185, 118140 for the bracket, and then ETBC-7 for the controller install kit on our 08 Dodge Grand Caravan.
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