etrailer | Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2018 Ford F-150

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-install-t...
Speaker 1: We're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 proportional trailer brake controller. This works for one up to four axles. Its part number is 90195. We're also going to be using the Tekonsha brake controller adapter pigtail, part number 22292.Now the big advantage we get with the P3 over other brake controllers especially the time delayed 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 going to 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 going to mean is when the trailers 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 if we're in 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 going to give you a lot of mounting options on where you want to put it. Even if you wanted to go like down on the dashboard or something like that.

Really not going to have any limits.Now to change our braking output, we've got our buttons right here. You can see max power is going to 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 going to vary on road conditions and it's also going to vary on the load that you have on your trailer.

The more weight typically the higher you're going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 can see it's going to go up to what we have set. So we're never going to have to worry about the trailer locking up and causing it to be unsafe.Now with those settings properly adjusted, you're never going to have to worry about your trailer tires locking up and causing you to be in an unsafe situation. The next setting's going to be out top right hand button. That's for our boost mode. Now that's going to change the quickness and aggressiveness in which your brakes are going to be applied. So for our lighter trailers, we really don't need it. We can typically brake with our vehicle, everything's going to 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 going to leave boost level off. You can see we've got a truck here with a small trailer. Now in boost one, we're going to a slightly larger utility trailer or tandem axle. Boost level two, that's going to 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 want to change the brightness or the color. It's going to allow us to change the brake type. So with this controller, not only are we going to be allowed to use 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 kind of like the brake controller set up differently or if you have different size trailers, you can have them preset in there. Be able to get to them without having to change all the settings.Now the manual override lever 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 us