Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2012 Chevrolet Silverado

Products Featured in this Video

Replacement Brake Control Plug-In Harness for Tekonsha and Draw-Tite Brake Controller 12" Long

689 reviews

Code: 20127

Retail: $19.76

Price:  $9.94

• Accessories and Parts
• Trailer Brake Controller
• Wiring Adapter

• Plugs into Brake Controller
• Universal
• Draw-Tite

Do you have a question about part 20127?more information >     

How to Install a Trailer Brake Controller on a 2012 Chevrolet Silverado

Today on our 2012 Chevrolet Silverado we're going to be doing an installation of the Tekonsha Voyager trailer brake controller. This is a one to four-axle controller and it is proportional. Part number is 39510. We're also going to be using the Tow Ready replacement brake control plug-in harness. This part number is 20127. You can see with everything hooked up, when your trailer is connected you're going to have a green light there indicating everything is fine. Now if you we're to manually input power you'll see that change.

The darker red it gets, the more gain we've got going back to our trailer. Same with the breaks. You hit it, it's going to turn colors indicating to you that it's providing power to the rear. It is fully adjustable here on the side to turn your gain up and down. As you can see with full gain, we have a dark red do not.

Draw that gain down not quite as much, just turns a little bit of a yellow color. Nice thing about the adjustable gain is that this is going to allow you to adjust the amount of braking power you want to go to the rear in relation to the weight on your trailer and what have you. The proportional aspect of this is nice also because if you slowly apply your brakes we're going to see our gain slowly going to come in and slowly going to activate. If we quickly press our brakes it immediately goes into that full braking, emergency-style braking power for us. The slide bar is going to let us manually apply the braking force to the rear of our trailer, allowing our trailer to slow down our vehicle if we choose that's what we want to do. As you can see, we're going to start our install by getting our wiring harness from up here. This is our brake pedal.

Brake pedal arm comes up and it's going to be located just to the driver side of that. If you can see, there's a piece of white tape right here that's going to hold that in place. We're going to cut that tape and pull those wires down to us. Here you can see once we get that cut off it's going to list what each of our wires are for so we'll want to hold onto that for reference. We can then pull our wires down.

As you can see, we've got plenty of room to make some good connections here under our dash. Now we can start hooking up our harness. Our harness is labeled ground, stop, power, and brake output. We just want to match that up with what we've got here and make sure we get it all done. This says white is ground so we'll connect our white wire with our white wire. To do this we're just going to use butt connectors today. Make sure that's got a nice hold. Then pull that end off our wire and connect our ground to our ground. One down, three to go. Now our red wire is our stop, so that's going to be our brake switch wire. That's indicated by the blue and white wire here. Get that one crimped down. Now our blue wire here, which is our brake output wire, that goes into the dark blue or the AUX, the auxiliary. Let's bring that down. Make those connections. The last one we've got to hook up is our power. It's going to be our black one here, power. That runs to the one that says battery here, b-a-t-t; that's battery. That's going to be the red and black wire, so that will be the one we've got right here. Now that's it for our connections under here. You do see the orange wire here. We're not going to be using this one so that's one that we'll bundle up here with our harness and then we'll wrap it down with some black tape. Then just depending on how nice you want everything to look here, you can continue on down your harness giving it a nice clean look. Once we get down, all we're going to be left with is a nice good looking wire loom there, and then the plug end that will go right into the back of the brake controller. Now we're going to mount our bracket, get it into position where we want it. Typically you're going to find a nice solid surface here underneath the dashboard somewhere. You can mount it up here on the dash. That's what's great about this Tekonsha. This can go anywhere from 0 degrees to -20 degrees, all the way up to 70 degrees. We're going to have a good full range of movement in how we can get our box mounted. Makes it really nice for applications like this. What we're going to do, we've got a good opportunity here to use a factory mounting location. Just use a Phillips screwdriver. We're going to take out this large screw. We'll slide our plate right in behind that and simply line up that hole and tighten that factory screw down. Now we'll use one of the self-tapping screws that came in the kit and we'll go right into our other slot there so we have two good, solid points of contact and security. That bracket's mounted nice, mounted solid. Now let's get our brake controller into position. This also uses self-tapping screws. Now we've got an option. We want to mount it flat. We got the two holes here on the side. We can use the two holes that are in the top of our bracket. If we want some adjustability, you see that lower set of holes is going to have that same fixed hole here in the front but it's kind of elongated there on that rear hole to allow us some up and down movement. I'm going to use the bottom set. The hardware you need's going to be provided. You don't want to use any hardware longer. You might damage the electronics in our controller there. Now we'll position it as we like it. I'm going to put it just like that so it's running up nicely right up against the bottom of the dash. Then we can go ahead and tighten our screws down. As you can see, that's going to hold it in place. Nice and secure there. We're not going to have to worry about it moving around. Now we just need to connect in our pigtail there and our plug. Then we'll coil this up and find a nice spot to tuck it up underneath the dashboard here. There we go. Then we'll just use a zip tie and secure that up. All right guys, that's really all there is to it. Now with it installed let's run through and give it a test. Now with everything working as it should, that's going to complete today's installation of the Tekonsha Voyager trailer brake controller, part number 39510, also using part number 20127, the Tow Ready replacement brake control plug-in harness. .