Curt 7-Way to RV Socket LED Circuit Tester - Vehicle End

Video Transcript for Curt 7-Way to RV Socket LED Circuit Tester Review

Hey, everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be checking out the CURT seven-way tester and this will allow you to check the lighting functions on your vehicle's seven-way trailer connector. This is gonna be a bladed style and work with just about all the different types of trucks and motor homes and RVs that have this style of plug. The way this is gonna work is super simple and it's gonna check all the different types of functions. So we'll have our brake controller if your vehicle's equipped with one, the backup or reverse lights, you have your right turn signal, your taillights, your left turn signal, your 12 volt auxiliary power, and then how trailer wiring is set up, whenever you hit your brakes, you should get the right turn and left turn to illuminate as well, 'cause the stop and turn's kind of integrated in one, if that makes sense. But really not a whole lot to it.

You'll come up to your vehicle, just plug that right into the 7-Way, and we can check our functions. So right now our 12 volt auxiliary power is illuminated. We'll have to hop in the truck and go through the signals to make sure that they're all working properly. Go ahead and try out our left turn signal, our right turn signal, we'll turn on our taillights. We're gonna hit our brake pedal.

And if you had a brake controller at this time you could do the apply power to it, make sure you're getting that signal back, and the test reverts, I'll have to go ahead and start up the vehicle here to get that signal sent back. (engine ignites) After running through the signals we verified everything is good to go on our vehicle side. And so having a tool like this is something good to have. It's gonna help you isolate a potential wiring problem. 'Cause it never fails, it always seems like you go to hook up to your trailer and one of the lights aren't working, or whatever the case may be.

And where do you go from there Is it the vehicle side Is it the trailer side So this is gonna help you determine that. So if you run into that issue, you can hook this up to your vehicle, run through the signals. If they're all working, you need to focus your energy on the trailer side. You might have a bad ground or a bad connection, burned out bulb or something along those lines. However, if you go to test out your vehicle and it's not working back here, chances are pretty good you need to focus your energy on the vehicle side, whether you have a blown fuse, something like that.

This'll help get you going in the right direction to make sure all your lights are gonna work and keep you safe and legal. Just to kind of do a quick comparison with the CURT one here, here we have a Pollak, and they're pretty much the same thing. I mean they look a little bit different. The color of the LEDs are a little bit different but it's not really a huge deal. The one thing that's somewhat notable is the CURT one's a little bit longer and so here we'll plug this in, give you an idea. So the CURT one, this part, the lights where you see extend well past our cap here. The Pollak one's a little bit shorter and so somewhat covered up by the cap. Again, not really a huge deal, but if that we're to bother you, if you we're doing it by yourself, it might be a little more kind of a pain to see what's going on, but not a huge deal. Something worth noting that I've experienced with both of these in the past, and this holds true for a lot of the testers with exception of the more high dollar ones, is being able to test that brake controller. So I've noticed, not every scenario, but sometimes if you get more of a late model truck, especially the ones that have the factory built-in trailer brake controllers, a lot of times you're not gonna be able to receive or test that brake controller output. The trucks are just too smart. They realize that this isn't a trailer with brakes and won't send that signal back. So if that happens to you, don't be totally surprised. On a lot of some older vehicles or vehicles that have an aftermarket type brake controller, a lot of those usually do work, but again, it's hit and miss. So just figured I'd throw that out there, that way you can at least expect that to potentially happen. So when it comes down to it this is a great little tool to have. it's small enough you can throw it in your glove box and the next time you encounter some lighting issues when you're going to hook up to your trailer, can break this out and help you get it all sorted and figure out what's going on. But I think that'll about do it for our look-at of the CURT 7-Way tester.