Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller Review
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Review of the Trailer Brake Controller
Speaker 1: Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 proportional trailer brake controller. This is gonna work great for one up to four axles. The party number is 90195. Now the big advantage we get with the P3 over other brake controllers especially the time delay brake controllers. With it being proportional, it senses the negative acceleration of our truck or the deceleration. And it brakes accordingly.
So if we really jam on the brakes hard, it's gonna give us braking power back to our trailer brakes very quickly.If we do it just in more of a stop and go traffic situation. It applies the brakes lightly. Essentially what that's gonna mean is when the trailer is doing its fair share of the work in a heavy braking application, you're saving wear and tear on your truck and the same vice versa on your trailer. So for a light braking situation, you're not overworking your trailer brakes causing those to wear out prematurely.Now the P3 can also be mounted in just about any position as long as we keep it straight in line with the direction of travel. That's gonna give you a lot of mounting options on where you wanna put it even if you wanted to go like down on the dashboard or something like that.
Really not gonna have any limits. Now to change are breaking output, we've got our buttons right here. You can see max power is gonna be 14 and we can bring that all the way down to zero.Zero would of course be when you don't want the brakes on your trailer to be applied. And then we can slowly bring that up to the adequate braking performance that we're looking for. That's gonna vary on road conditions and it's also gonna vary on the load that you have on your trailer.
The more weight, typically the higher you're gonna set this. And a rule of thumb is to set this just below where the wheels on your trailer will lock up. So on a lighter load, they're gonna lock up sooner than with a heavier load.So we'll just move that up. Then when we operate it, you can see it's gonna go up to that 2728 if that's where we have it set. Whether we do our floor brake, when we're in movement or a manual override here.
Now if we move that up, whether we hit the brake on our floor again or we hit our manual override, you see it's gonna up to what we have set. So we're never gonna have to worry about the trailer locking up and causing it to be unsafe. Now with those settings properly adjusted, you're never gonna have to worry about your trailer tires locking up and causing you to be in an unsafe situation.The next setting's gonna be our top right hand button. That's for our boost mode. Now that's gonna change the quickness and aggressiveness in which your brakes are gonna be applied. So for a lighter trailers, we really don't need it. We can typically brake with our vehicle. Everything's gonna be safe. But as those get heavier and heavier, we want those to come on more quickly and more aggressively to keep everything handling properly. Now in standard small utility trailers pulling it behind your vehicle, you're probably just gonna leave boost level off.You see we've got a truck here with a small trailer. Now in boost one, we're going to a slightly larger utility trailer, tandem axle. Boost level two, that's gonna go up to more like a fifth wheel style trailer and boost level three, again, a larger trailer than that. Now that changes the quickness and aggressiveness in which your brakes are applied. So as our loads get heavier, we want those to come on more quickly and more aggressively to keep everything nice and safe. Now we also have our menu here. The menu allows us to change our display settings, whether we wanna change the brightness or the color. It's gonna allow us to change the brake type so with this controller, not only are we gonna be allowed to use an electric brakes, but also electric over hydraulic.And then finally we've got our help mode here if we needed some assistance. The P3 will also allow you to program a couple of settings. So if you have different drivers that kinda like the brake controller set up differently or if you have different size trailers, you can have them pre-set in their, be able to get to them without having to change all the settings. Now the manual override level, you can see, is really easy to get to here. This is designed to allow us to apply the brakes of our trailer without applying the brakes of our truck.Typically this is used in a sway event type situation. Now the P3's gonna have some built in safe guards too. The first is gonna be battery rem down protection. So if we stop and park somewhere, if we're not using our brake controller, it's gonna power off after a few minutes to keep our trucks battery safe. Next it has short protection, and it's gonna protect both the truck and the brake controller from faults coming from our trailer. And now if you'll take a look at this screen, it's gonna have disconnect warning. So if the trailer plug we're to wiggle out somehow or not be connected properly, it's gonna flash and let us know.As soon as we get that plugged back in and we have a proper connection made, it's gonna go right back to its normal operating mode. Now when comparing the P3 to other brake controllers available on the market, it definitely stands out above any other time delayed systems. As you can see with the time delay brake controller, we have a pre-set amount of time it's going to take for our brake controller to get to the maximum gain that we have set. This means with a setting to high, we can cause premature wear on our trailers brakes and tires. Or with a setting to low, we can cause premature wear on our vehicles brakes.Now when you reach 100% with the time delay controller, it's gonna stay at that gain level the entire time your foots on the brake. With the newer technology built in, the proportional aspect is definitely the way you wanna go. Now this controller is also designed to work with the electric over hydraulic braking system. So if you have that, I'd be a great choice. When you compare that to other brake controllers on the market, some of them are not gonna offer that feature. Now the Prodigy P3 is one of the most popular brake controllers available on the market. And you see it echoed over and over again in our customer reviews.It's like Dennis C said, "In my opinion, the Tekonsha brake control products are the best on the market. I purchased the Prodigy P3 as an upgrade to my old Tekonsha Explorer unit. The added features that come with this unit such as the boost feature and electronic read out are exceptional and easy to program." A year later he said, "I'm as happy today as when I purchased this unit. I have made several long hauls, 3,000 miles or more, and many short hauls with my trailer. This controller has worked flawlessly."And that'll complete our look at the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 proportional trailer brake controller. Part number 90195.
Bob O.
5/30/2020
Will this work with Jeep Gladiator sport with max tow package? Is the gladiator set up for pre wired easy install!
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Joseph M.
8/9/2020
2016 GMC Sierra 1500 SLE 4x4 towing a 28 foot Loadrite triple axle trailer with a 7500 lb. boat on it. I have a reservoir mounted on the trailer with a battery and brake away cable. I’m assuming that this system is electric over hydraulic. Is this correct? If so will the P3 be right for me? Can you supply me the correct part numbers for installation? Thank You,