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Curt Venturer Trailer Brake Controller - 1 to 3 Axles - Time Delayed

727 reviews

Code: C51110

Retail: $85.95

Price:  $52.97

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

• Dash Mount
• Up to 3 Axles
• LED Display
• Up to 360 Degrees
• CURT

A simple LED display and a slide-bar manual override make this time-delayed brake controller easy to read and easy to use. Installation is quick and simple with no mounting restrictions. Activates brakes with a preset intensity.

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Review of the Curt Venturer Trailer Brake Controller

Today we're going to be taking a look at CURT's Venturer Time-Delay Trailer Brake Controller. This is a very slim and thin brake controller. So if you're looking for something that's going to have a minimal impact in your vehicle, this is definitely one of the smaller ones out there. As far as a brake controller that's in one package like this. And since it's a time delay brake controller, you can put it pretty much wherever you want, because the orientation's really not that important. Many of your proportional brake controllers need to be mounted in a specific orientation, they have to be leveled side to side, and front to back needs to be fairly level as well.

There is angles that you are allowed, but you can't have any angle. And that's due to those having an internal inertia sensor, which allows them to be proportional, because that inertia sensor detects the vehicle movement here as we go to stop.With our time delay, we don't have that sensor inside giving us the freedom to mount this where we want. We can put it behind the dash, in the glove box, wherever. I usually do recommend you have it in a place where you can access the manual slider so you can use that, though.The way our time delay brake controller works, is it's pretty much it's kind of like it says in the name. We have two adjustments, we've got the gain, as well as the sink, located here on the side.

These are just sliders that slide back and forth, and allow you to hit the minimum and maximum. The gain is your maximum output, so if we put the slider over here, you can see our display here showing maximum bars. We've got it all the way over. If I turn it down, you can see that our maximum output is adjusted there.When we press the brakes, the sink will choose how quickly it builds up to that maximum setting that we've got our gain here. So if we go all the way up, you'll see, boom, how quickly and aggressively it would apply our brakes.

If we turn it all the way down, it will gradually build up our pressure on the brakes back there, giving us smoother operation. So you're just going to need to test with your trailer. And it's going to vary depending upon whether you've got it loaded or unloaded. In a lot of cases, if you've got it unloaded, you're going to have this set quite low. You can load it up, and then you'll turn it up, and you may need to adjust that sink to have more aggressive breaking if it feels like it's not applying quickly enough.

Like your trucks kind of taking the brunt and then it starts to kick in.There's also our manual override here, and this is useful for a lot of different applications. I like to use it for testing purposes. You can press this over, and then verify if you've got your output back at your seven way. You could also be driving your vehicle, maybe five, 10, 15 miles an hour when you're testing it, to make sure your brakes are working. And instead of hitting the brake pedal on your vehicle, you can hit your slider over. And then you can see how aggressively the brakes are applying. If they're able to bring your vehicle to a stop, how long it takes them to come to a stop, that can be really useful for helping you determine your settings, especially for the gain output.And it's also useful if your trailer starts to sway. Sometimes when you're pulling your trailer, and it's going to start going back and forth a little bit like this. By bringing our slider over, just momentarily, it's going to apply the brakes, which is going to cause our trailer and our vehicle to want to somewhat separate. Because our trailer's going to become slower then, because the brakes are applying, and they're going to go like this. So instead of this being able to do this, they're going to become taunt, and it's going to keep you in a nice straight line. You can then let off, and in most cases, the sway is not going to come back unless you we're to get a heavy crosswind, or hit some potholes, or whatever else caused it in the first place.This time delay brake controller is going to be a great, economical, entry-level option. And the economical reason is one of the biggest reasons why had chosen it for my truck here. It is an older truck, and I really didn't want to put a lot of money into it. I just want it to be able to do the things I need it to do. And I've got my pop-up camper here that I want to be able to bring with me, and operate the brakes. So this was a nice, easy, and economical way for me to have that happen. This is a single axle trailer, but at home I also have a car hauler that is a tandem axle, and I wanted a break controller that would work with that as well.This brake controller works up to three axles. So it's got no problem with my pop-up camper here, as well as my car hauler. In addition to working with bumper pull trailers, like the pop-up camper that I was showing you, or a car hauler like I have at home, you can also use it with gooseneck and fifth wheel trailers like we have here. Because this is going to work with up to three axles, so our tandem-axle, gooseneck trailer here should be no problem. And even if you've got a larger fifth wheel gooseneck trailer with triple axles, you can do that as well.Now, keep in mind, you will need a seven way connector. Check your vehicle and verify if it is a factory tow package, and verify what type of connections you've got. If you've got a four-pole connector, we can use kit ETBC-7 00:04:44 to turn that four pole into a fully operational, working seven way connector. A lot of your vehicles that have a factory tow package may not have a seven-way connector at the back, but a lot of them do have plugs at the back for a seven way connector. So I would recommend using our fit guide to determine what type of wiring package you're going to need. Whether it's just a connector that'll plug in and work with your factory wiring, or if you need the full ETBC-7 kit to wire it up yourself.Now that we've gone over some of the features, let's go over a typical installation. Now it is going to vary slightly depending upon your vehicle model, where you're going to route your wiring, and what kit that you're going to need to get it installed. Because with your brake controller, you are going to get mounting hardware, mounting bracket, and everything you see here. So we can easily get it mounted up to our dash. It just kind of screws right into the dash. And you don't have to put it in there, you can put it wherever you like. This is just a common location, because it's easy to access, make adjustments, while you're driving.Once you've got it mounted up though then you're going to need to wire it up. And normally I'd have this wires zip tied up, but I left it loose so we could show you what we got going on here. Coming out of the back of our brake controller, we've got four wires that go to a connector. Now, here is a universal harness from CURT that I've installed, and it just clicks into the connector here, coming off of our brake controller, you can kind of see that here. They just click right together. On this universal harness here on the other end, it just goes to bare wires that we can strip back and make the connections as necessary.If you've got an older vehicle, or one without a factory tow package, then I would highly recommend this universal to get it installed. You will also likely need kit ETBC-7 if you don't have a factory tow package, or you've got an older vehicle like mine here, and that's going to provide you with the seven pole connector at the back and all the necessary wiring connectors you'll need to run all those circuits, to get a fully operating seven way connector. If you are going to be doing that like me, then we'll need to wire up these wires. But there is another option out there if you've got a newer vehicle, especially if you got one with the factory tow package. CURT does have custom fit harnesses available, with the connector in here, that plugs into our CURT brake controller. But on the other end of our harness, instead of having bare wires, it has a factory connector that'll plug right into your vehicle. You'll want to use our fit guide to determine you're getting the appropriate custom fit connector for your vehicle.If you do have that type of vehicle, and you can just plug that in. Once you've got it plugged in, for the most part, your installation is usually complete. Your brake controller is operational ready to go. Every now and then you may need to refer to your owner's manual, and install a fuse in your fuse box. You'll want to look for trailer, or something like that, maybe T-R-L.But now, if you we're like me, using in the universal, we do need to hook these up manually. So we've got four circuits here that we're going to connect. You can see it's the same colors coming off the other end of our harness here. So we've got our white wire here, which is our ground wire. This one, on the other end of our harness, I just attached a ring terminal to it, and ran it into the metal surface underneath the dash to give us our ground. The red wire here is our brake signal input, from the brake stop light switch on the vehicle, going to our brake controller. This lets the brake controller know when you're pressing the brake pedal. If you have an older vehicle like this, you can easily tap into that and get your signal using a quick splice.Some of your brand new modern vehicles do you have variable voltage stoplight switches, in which the output may be incompatible with a brake controller. But we do have custom fit stoplights, which is here at etrailer.com, so you can add an additional stoplight switch to have the appropriate output.Our blue wire here is our brake signal output, this is what's coming from our brake controller and going to the seven way at the back of the vehicle, to operate the trailer brakes on the trailer. And most cases, if you don't already have this, you're going to be using kit ETBC-7 to make that run. You could also purchase individual wiring components here at etrailer.com, but I highly recommend ETBC-7 if you are running your own. And lastly, we've got the black wire here. And that is our power wire to power up our brake controller. This just runs outside, underneath the hood of our vehicle, and connects to the battery positive. I did use a circuit breaker and wired it in line with this to ensure we have proper circuit protection. If you we're to purchase kit ETBC-7, that would come included with it, so you'd have all that circuit protection that you need. And that completes our look at CURT's Venturer Time-Delay Trailer Brake Controller..