Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe

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Tekonsha POD Trailer Brake Controller - 1 to 2 Axles - Time Delayed

1218 reviews

Code: 39523

Retail: $89.45

Price:  $51.93

• Trailer Brake Controller
• Time Delayed Controller
• Electric
• Automatic Leveling
• Under-Dash Box

• Dash Mount
• Up to 2 Axles
• Indicator Lights
• Up to 360 Degrees
• Tekonsha

This time-delayed brake controller is designed to mount at any angle, even upside down. The controls are all up front for easy access, including a slide-bar manual override and a thumbwheel for braking output. LED indicator shows your braking status.

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How to Install a Trailer Brake Controller on a 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe

Today, on our 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe, we'll be taking a look at and installing the Tekonsha PowerTrac electronic braking control system, Part #39523, with assistance from from ourETBC7 wiring harness, part#ETBC7. Here's what it's going to look like once it's installed. Let's go ahead and plug in our trailer to see the green light on the side turn on. This will indicate that our trailer is plugged in, and then when we remove our trailer, or unplug it, you'll see that light turns off. Once again, we'll bring it in, and leave it connected, while we talk about the gain button that's here on the left. You'll have a little wheel that goes up to increase the gain, or down, depending on which way you mount your box.

Just follow the diagram and the instructions to increase the gain and the power that's going to be going to your trailer. For the manual braking, you press in the lever here, to apply as much brakes as you need. Really simple and easy to use and easy to install. Let's go ahead and check out how it's installed. Here, for when we get started, we're going to have our 4-pole wiring coming down out of the back where it connects up to our taillights. Then it comes out through that rubber grommet here that's sealed with some RTD or some rubber silicone right here on the back side.

Running that along the wiring harness to come out by our receiver hitch. Keep in mind that you're going to want to keep it away from the exhaust as much as possible and any moving parts. Back here at the back we'll go ahead and use our long bracket which will be sold separately, to attach and bring out that ETBC7 universal wiring harness that's got that 7-pole adapter. We'll attach out plate before we put out long bracket on there and attach it. To do so, use the provided hardware, which will be two Phillips-head bolts.

Slide it through the top, lining up with the holes in the bracket and placing on our star nuts on the bottom side. Now that we've got those on there, let's go ahead and tighten them down. You can go ahead and use a 3/8 open-end wrench on the back side, and a Phillips-head screwdriver on the other side to tighten it down and make sure that it's going to be nice and secure. We'll go ahead and open up our clamp that's provided with that long bracket kit, just be able to slide it on out. Then we'll wrap this around our receiver hitch in our desired location, placing up our long bracket and running our clamp through. We're going to pull it tight, and then we can go ahead and ratchet it down.

We'll go ahead and cut off that extra piece that's hanging down. Now go ahead and take our 7-pole wiring harness, that ETBC7 kit that has a 4-pole connector and 7-pole connector on it and thread our wires through the bracket. Slide them up through the bottom, and insert the bracket on to the back of the vehicle. Go ahead and place in our screws that are provided, for securing these, and the nut on the back side. There's going to be a total of four to secure this bracket on to the back side, two on each side. Go ahead and start with connecting our 4-pole connector to that 4-pole coming off of our vehicle. Go ahead and use a little bit of dielectric grease, part #11755. Place it in the connector to make sure that we have a good connection. Press the two together, and then we'll take a zip tie and place it around it to ensure that connection stays nice and tight. Go an snip off the excess, then we'll move on to connecting out blue and black wire to the duplex provided in the kit. Go ahead and strip back the duplex wire provided in the kit. Insert the black wire in to the black wire coming off of your 7-pole connector. Then we'll crimp that down. Then the white wire, plug into the blue wire coming off our 7-pole. This will be for our brake controller. With those wires connected, let's go ahead and tape those off. Since we're not going to be using our purple wire, since that's for our reverse circuit on our 7-pole, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up in case if the customer would ever like to use it in the future. We'll fold it up, and attach it to that duplex that we just taped off. Now we're going to attach that ground wire, which is going to be that white wire, using the provided self-tapping screw. Find a good spot on the sheet metal, usually where it doubles up, like right here on this cross inaudible 00:05:22. We needed to scrape off a little bit if that undercoating, just to give it a good spot to mount up to. Then we'll take that self-tapping screw and thread it on in. Make sure you thread it in beforehand, before you attach the white wire. Go ahead and use one of the provided zip ties and secure that white wire to the back where we have all our other wires. That way it'll pull the tension slack out of it. We'll take some of the provided wire loom and place it over these wires here on the back, we'll slide it over the end and rotate it around and then tape it off. Now we're going to run that duplex over the top of the exhaust, securing it to the wire loom where we have that 4-pole wire running and then coming back across, away from any of the moving parts like the suspension and the exhaust, and the drive shaft. All right, now we'll go ahead and zip tie up all of our wires. Now with this here in our engine compartment on the driver's side where the battery is located, we're going to run down our pole cord, which is an old piece of air line that we have, but you can also use a coat hanger if you have one, or whatever is easier for you. We're going to run that down along the back of the firewall, to come out at the bottom. We're just going to tape it off here, so we make sure it doesn't fall down when we lift the car back up and get underneath to get our wires. Whether you're crawling under there and laying under there doing all this, or if you have a lift handy, you're going to need to do the same thing. We'll connect our duplex to the pole wire using some electrical tape. Then we'll grab our pole wire and pull our wires up top. We'll go ahead and attach our relays now. We're going to be using the 40 amp which is noted here on the side and our 20 amp fuse, that's provided in the kit. We'll set them both next to each other and use this nice little lip here on the edge. Use the self-tapping screws that area provided to attach them. Let's start with the center one by overlapping them and connecting them together. Attach two screws, one on each side. Now we're going to trim back our duplex cover, because one of our wires is going to stay full. It's going to be that white wire, that's going to run in to connect to the blue wire on our brake controller. It's going to run into the engine compartment on the vehicle. The black wire will be attaching to our 4o amp and then running to the battery. Once we pull off the cover to our duplex, you'll see that we have that white wire and black wire exposed and we can trim back our black wire to make our connection to our 40-amp relay. We'll take a zip tie, and secure our duplex here at the top of this wire harness. That way it doesn't slide down on us. Trim off the excess, bring our black wire up, cut it off, where it's attached to that silver post. Take our strippers, and strip back that black wire. Attach our small ring terminal, provided in the kit, and crimp it down. Remove the nut and washer on the silver post. Remove the star washer. Place the black wire with the ring terminal over, place the star washer back on and the nut. Strip back the end that we cut off on our black wire, connect another ring terminal. We're going to put this on the copper side of that same relay. This is going to go to our positive side of our battery. Go ahead and move down here to our positive side of our battery. Press in the tab to lift up the cover. Use a 10mm socket to loosen up the nut here on the battery. Figure out our length that we're going to need, trim it off, strip it back, and make our connection. Place on the big ring terminal, crimp it down. Go ahead and trim a notch in it to help us get it in place. We'll take our excess black wire once again, strip off the end, place over our second large ring terminal, crimp it down, and we'll notch it once again. Loosen it up so we can get it on there, secure it. Now see if your cover needs to be notched at all, you can do that as well. We'll use a pair of snips here and trim it out around the edge. We should be able to close our cover down now. Now our second wire that's coming off the 12-volt power supply is going to connect to that 20-amp relay on the copper side. Go ahead and strip it back and place on your butt connector. Crimp it down, and remove the nut and star washer off the top of the post. Make your connection, place on the star washer and the nut. Take the excess black wire once again, trim off one end, strip it back, place on our butt connector, inaudible 00:13:11 it down, and then we're going to connect that to the silver post on the 20-amp relay. Fold over our excess wires, since we do have quite a bit left over, and that other half we're going to use as our ground while this one is still the brake wire. When we're done cutting it, we're going to need to mark it which one is our brake wire and which one is a ground, so we can tell them apart. Go ahead and fold our white wire in half, and then cut it. Now we'll have the end for the brake controller coming off of our 7-way at the back of the vehicle and then we'll use this other one as our ground to go on the inside. Go ahead and connect a ring terminal, crimp in down, and we're going to connect this one to the negative side of the battery. Loosen up the negative post, and we'll notch it once again. Go ahead and tighten that back up. Go ahead and take your Sharpie and make a bunch of tic marks on the white wire that's coming from our brake controller. There's going to be a big rubber grommet with the wiring harness coming through it just down next to the brake booster against the firewall. We're going to be poking our hole through there to run all three of these wires into the passenger compartment. We're going to have that power wire that's coming off that 20-amp fuse, we'll have the brake control wire that we've marked up, and then our negative wire coming off of our battery. Let's go ahead and do that now. We'll use a little bit of spray lubricant just to spray the grommet to make it easier to get the wires through. Then use a coat hanger to poke the hole or a screw driver works as well if you can get down in there. Here you can see our wire coming through our grommet on the inside of the vehicle. This will give you a better idea where it's located. Let's go back into the engine compartment and connect our wires to pull through. We're going to bend over the end, tape that off, then we'll connect our wires. We'll then pull our wires through, you might have to work them a little bit. We'll come up here and find the best location on the dash to mount our brake controller. In our case, we're going to go ahead and mount it to the removable fuse and OBD door. Pull out on the handle, and it comes down. We'll mount our bracket to this, but first let's get our universal wiring harness hooked up. The red wire is going to go to our brake switch, which is going to be our wire that comes off of our brake pedal and indicates when our brakes our being applied. The blue wire is going to go to that white wire that we made all those tic marks on, and then of course, the ground and power, which are all labeled. We'll go ahead and use our tester here, to test out our brake switch wire. It's going to be this red wire located right above the switch. We'll go ahead and get it connected up so we can show you. All right, you should see the red light come on when I press the brake. That's how we're going to know that's going to be our brake switch wire. We'll go ahead and take that red wire from that universal connector and connect it using our quick-connect provided in our kit. We'll take our quick-connector, get our red wire and separate it from the rest of them here, and then place on that quick-connector. We'll slide it all the way over and then we'll take our red wire and pass it into the other side here. Now with our brake switch wire connected, we'll connect our other three wires to the wires that we've brought in to the driver's side compartment of the vehicle. In some applications it may be necessary to extend your brake switch wire just because that universal harness might not be long enough to get to your mounting location. Use some extra wire that you have laying around or some extra wire left over from the ETBC7 kit. Just make sure you know which wire's which. Now we'll route all of our wires to where we want to mount our brake controller. All right, now we'll go ahead and strip back our wires from the universal wire adapter and place on our butt connectors. Now that we have all our butt connectors on our universal wiring harness, go ahead and strip back those wires coming from the vehicle. Remember that blue one is going to be the one that has the tic marks on it that we made when we pulled it through. Now that we've got all those taken care of, we'll go ahead and tape them off using a little electrical tape so that no dirt and debris gets in there. We make sure that those connections stay there for a long time. This is going to be your quick connection point for your brake controller. The nice thing about it, with this vehicle in particular and where the customer wanted it mounted, is that it's going to be on that fuse panel that can be removed. All those wires will be tucked into there and out of sight and out of mind. When they want to take it off, if they want to take their brake controller off, all they're going to do is simply lower it and disconnect it. Let's go ahead and plug in our brake controller, and see if it works. You can see with our trailer connected, our light's going to be on in green. Now we'll go ahead and mount it up. Since we have our diagram here on the back side of that fuse cover, we're going to lay out our bracket and actually thread it through using those extra self-tapping screws we had from the back side. That way we ensure that we don't damage the diagram when we come through the other direction. When we pull that off you'll see that the diagram is still going to be in good shape. On the back side, we'll have our mounts for our brackets. We'll then place our bracket. Now that we have our bracket mounted, we can then attach our brake controller. Now we'll go ahead and use the black screws that are provided to attach our brake controller box to our bracket. We'll go ahead and tighten those down once we have it in the location where we want it. We'll then pull off that cover, route our wires through, make our connection, and sure back up our cover. that will do it for the review of the installation of the Tekonsha PowerTrac electronic brake control system, part #39523, with assistance from our ETBC7 wiring harness, part #ETBC7 on our 2015 Hyundai Santa Fe. You can find this and everything else right here at etrailer.com.