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Full transcript: www.etrailer.com/tv-install-t...
Today on our 2009 Cadillac Escalade, we're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3, proportional trailer break controller for 1, up to 4 axles. Part number on it is 90195. Now the P3's proportional setup is really going to help us out in many different situations, whether it's an emergency braking situation where we really need maximum force immediately. The P3 picks up on that and it's going to send that power back to our trailer, right up to whatever level we have it set at. If we're just in stop and go traffic, and we're just lightly applying the brakes here and then, it's also going to sense that so we don't have to worry about the wheels on our trailer lighting up or dragging our truck down a lot when we just want a little bit of braking power to be applied. Now you can see here on the bottom, we've got a manual override lever. This is going to allow us to manually apply our trailer brakes in the events that we need to. Nice thing about is no matter where we've got our output set, when we reach down in the panic situation it's only going to go up to that number for us.
Here we've got our power setting adjustment here. Bring that down or up, just depending on the weight of our trailer and how much braking force we're going to need. Another nice thing about is going to be our boost levels. The boost levels are going to set the initial power and aggressiveness in which our brakes come on. For boost 1, that would be for a lighter trailer.
As we move up through our boost levels, it goes to bigger and bigger trailers. We can even set the boost off if we've got a light unloaded trailer that we won't need that immediate, immediate response from. Other great thing about the Tekonsha is you can see we've got setups for the display, the brake type, and help to help us work through everything. It has 5 store-able settings for different trailers, drivers, or conditions. Now we need to begin our installation by finding our factory wiring that's going to exist underneath the dashboard. Here we've got our on board diagnostic port. We're going to go back from that about 4 inches, just about to the very front of our parking brake here.
There's going to be a wiring harness that runs right behind this little tab. There's a piece of tape that's holding it on and it's got this piece of white paper on it, that indicates what needs to be connected where. We want to be careful and just lightly trim that tape. Then pull down our harness. You can see we've got a red with black, dark blue, a white, and then a light blue with white. Let's pull off our tag here as well.
You'll see on here it's going to tell us what we need to connect where. We need to look at our brake controller instructions, it's also going to have instructions for what wire goes to what. We'll start with our ground here, let's strip this off. Use one of the smaller butt connectors, provided with our brake controller. Let's go through and we'll add our connectors to each one of our wires here. The 2 small wires get the blue butt connectors. The 2 larger ones are going to get the yellow. Now we'll bring in the pig tail that's going to come with the brake controller, and we'll use the diagram that we've got here and we'll use the list that we've got here and we're going to match that up to the list that's in our instructions. Let's start hooking up our wires. Our white wire is going to go the white wire. Our black wire is going to be our battery wire, that goes to the red and black. Our red wire is going to go to our stop light wire, which is going to be the light blue and white. Then finally, our darker blue wire that's going to be connected to the darker blue wire from our pig tail. All right, now let's take a second. Just to kind of tape this all up. Make it look a little bit nicer. All right, now with that wrapped up, that will give us a nice clean wiring look so we won't have 4 separate wires hanging out. We're just going to set that aside, let's get our brake controller put in. We can mount our brake controller, we can pick any spot here on or under the dash that we like. I like to use the small screw that's right here, there's already a hole there, it goes into a metal bracket. It's going to give us a lot of support. You can mount up here on the dash if you want, as long as you stay in our angle limitations on it. The one area I would avoid would be over here on this left side. You might bump your knee when you're getting in and out of the car. Just anywhere over on this side should be fine, or right down here where we're going to go. I'll just pul