Heavy Duty Magnetic Tow Light Set - Incandescent - 30' Harness

Video Transcript for A Closer Look at the Heavy Duty Magnetic Tow Light Set

Hi there flat towers. Today we're gonna be taking a look at buyer's products, magnetic light kit. And this is what our light kit looks like when it's installed. It will adhere to any magnetic surface. So on some vehicles you might be limited. That's why we've got it lower here on our Jeep rather than on the roof, because it won't stick up there.

But this is an acceptable spot. It's right near where the factory lights are. So it's plenty within visible view for people behind you to know your intentions when going down the road. It has nice thick cabling on it. A lot of the cables you see on the magnetic light kits here at E-trailer have just exposed like four pole wiring.

But this is a very thick sheathing over the cabling which makes it feel like this is something that's gonna last a very long time. As long as this cable doesn't fall down and drag on the road for a few miles, I don't see this having any issues for several years of service. And on the bottom of this slide, it does have a felt like material that'll help keep it from causing any scratches or abrasions to your vehicle. And it is a fairly strong magnet if we kinda hold it away and watch it draw in, I mean that's right about a half inch away and I can feel it really pulling towards the vehicle there. So I don't feel like this is something that's gonna be able to fall off or really vibrate going down the road, it feels very secure on the vehicle.

And this kit is an incandescent kit and has a very easy way to remove and replace the bulbs if they do go out. It does kind of, this is the best thing in the world that it's not LED. LEDs typically last significantly longer, usually between five and 10 times longer than an incandescent. It also draws more current than an incandescent. It shouldn't be really putting any strain on your system here since when you plug this in, you're really just powering these lights but it's definitely more efficient to go with an LED version.

But it just kind of depends, LEDs typically are not replaceable. So if you're somebody that's planning on using this for a real long time and you like to do all your own maintenance, this might be the better option for you because you can maintain these. And with these, you do also get 30 feet of cable. So you have plenty of cable for your kind of mid-size vehicles, like our unlimited Jeep here but also for your longer full size trucks, you should have no problem getting those lights from the back all the way up to the front. And you're probably gonna have a little bit excess to work with, which I like too 'cause if any issues we're to occur down the road, you forget something and damage your wiring, slamming into a compartment when storing it or something, with that much extra cable there then you can probably make your own repair without having to buy anything. Just fix the issue that you cause on the wiring. And here at the front, it is a four round connector that is used in this setup here, we'll go ahead and unplug it. It also includes the four round female connector that goes on that side if you need that for your motor home. Now, four round really isn't the most common that you're gonna see on the back of a motor home for like a flat toe setup like this. But I mean, you can get adapters here at E-trailer. You have the connectors, so you can easily hardwire that in. And it does feel like it's all very heavy duty. This is a nice strong metal. There's no plastic ends here, all metal on that side as well. And this cable relief is really nice 'cause that's often the most common place for failure, is where a cable's coming out of the back of a connector, the strain of the weight on it, especially going down the road bouncing, that's where you get failures. With this nice spring mechanism here, that's gonna support the cable. So we don't get that issue recurring, but it still has flex so we can move it around and use it as we need to. So yeah, it's really nice heavy duty cabling. And that is probably the best part I would say of this magnetic light kit is how heavy duty and strong they've made the cables and connectors. Now magnetic lights, I think are a little bit more of a product that is for just some people. Cause the majority of people out there, I would recommend a diode wiring kit. The diode wiring kit is installed on your vehicle and integrates into the vehicle so that way it uses the factory lights to produce all the signals. Now it is a much more involved installation process for a diode wiring kit. With this one, you just simply set it up and plug it in. It's very easy to use, this one. The other one is gonna be more upfront. But once you do that upfront installation on the diode wiring, you simply have to plug in your connector because everything's there. You don't have to get out your wiring, set it up and run it to the front. So it does become easier in the long run but the initial upfront is more difficult. The other issue you run into with a magnetic setup like this is the supplemental breaking system that you're gonna choose to use on your vehicle. There are some such as the stay and play duo and many other of the permanently mounted ones that require tapping into the lighting signals from your motor home. So it can use the brake signals to determine when to appropriately apply the system. But if you're using a portable system that doesn't tap into it or in this case here, this is an air brake loader home, we got an air force 1, it's all run off air pressure. We don't need those signals. So they would work out great in this setup that we're using here. And we set 'em up on our Jeep here today and you can see how we got it set up. They worked out very nice on the Jeep. It was lower than I would like it to be. But since it's so close to the factory lights, it should still be plenty visible for everybody out there to know what's going on. All right, we're gonna begin our installation by getting our connector here wired up. This is the connector that comes in your kit. Now, if you already have a four round connector at the back of your vehicle, you don't need to wire this one in. And if you have an existing seven way or four flat connector, you really don't need to wire this one in either. You could just get an adapter that goes to a four round so you can plug your lights in. We're gonna go ahead and wire it up here and what we're gonna be doing to wire it up is we're actually just gonna go to an adapter ourselves. That goes to a seven way so we can plug it into the existing seven way, but I will show you the wiring here. So if you have a seven way and you want to hard wire it in, I've got those labeled so we can show you on there which wire would go where on your vehicle. Let's get this side mounted up first. There's a small screw located here. We're gonna undo that screw so we can slide out the inner assembly and wire our wires into it. And the four round has all the same functions as a four flat. So it's gonna be the same, all the same wires, just a different shape connector. Once you undo the screw, open up the door and this will slide out that direction. So just push out with your screwdriver there and there we have our connector. So now we're gonna start wiring it in but we need to make sure that you hook all the wires to the correct location of the back. And the labeling's not very well. Doesn't really usually match up with typical four poles. That's why we're gonna show you how to wire it. What I recommend doing here to make sure that you wire it up correctly, this is the plug on the end of your lights that you would plug into your vehicle. We're gonna use this to help us because we have this notch here at the top. So we know that that means it's gonna insert into the plug like this, 'cause the notch goes at the top. We can tell because the inside of there has a notch at the top. We also know that the screw hole is at the bottom on this connector. So when we see our screw hole down there, right there, we're gonna put that at the bottom, away from our notch and plug it in. So now we know we've got it in the correct orientation of how it would sit inside the connector. So then we can wire it up now. So we're gonna go ahead and loosen each one of these up with our Phillip screwdriver here. There's a small screw on the side, and that's what holds the wire in place. It works like a little set screw. So we're just gonna go in the side there and loosen it up. We just need to have it loose enough to be able to poke our wire in. So it's probably far enough and then we're gonna do that with each one so that way we can start inserting our wires. Now that we've got 'em loosened up, we're gonna separate each one of our wires. Now this wiring doesn't come included with your kit. This is what traditional four pole wiring looks like. You got green, yellow, brown, and white. So if you buy some wiring from us here so you can use it, this is typically how it'll come. We wanna separate each one. Looks like they're already split there. If they're not split, you may need to cut in between them to separate them. After you get 'em split, we can peel back a little bit on 'em to separate 'em a little bit further from one another to make 'em easier to work with. And we'll strip back each one of these. All right, so now we can hook our wires into the back of the connector. We're gonna hold the connector in here with that notch towards the top. So we've got a reference point and then the top right one is the one we're gonna start in and that's going to be our green wire. So we're just gonna poke the green wire in there. Make sure you get all your strands in. See, we got one stray little strand there. You can twist them around to help prevent that from happening 'cause that strand could touch another circuit and cause some strange functionality. After we slide it in there, we're just gonna tighten the screw onto the wire. We do wanna make sure it's on the wire and not on the sheathing, 'cause if it's on the sheathing, it will not make a good connection. Below our green wire, we're gonna insert the brown wire. So you can just separate the other two away from it there, slide that one in and then you're gonna tighten that one down. If we just continue going in a circle, inserting all of our wires, the next one is going to be our white one. And then of course that leaves the last one to be our yellow one. Once we get this last one tightened down, we can go ahead and reassemble our connector. All right, so now we've got our wire made here. We can go ahead and slide it into our connector end. So just take the end of your wire, push it through there. And then we can pull this back through. We do need to line the screw hole up with the bottom. So let's see if we can find that there. There's our screw hole, that needs to go down. So that way we can reinstall our screw. And you do need to kind of line it up a little bit. There we go. That looks like we had it pretty close right there. So we can go ahead and reinsert our screw and tighten it down. All right, so we've got our connector end prepared here now. This end of our wiring we would then wanna either wire directly into the vehicle to get all those lighting signals for it, or we would wanna wire it to some sort of adaptor that you can plug into an existing connector that you may already have. So if you have regular four pole flat wiring here, then it'd be as simple as matching up and wiring everything color for color. So you just add your green to your green, yellow, yellow, brown to brown, white to white. If you have a seven way connector, you have more pins here. And the wire colors actually aren't going to necessarily match up. Seven ways can use multiple different wiring color combinations. So it's important that you wire it to the pin, that is for that appropriate function. And I've gone ahead and labeled them. So this is the end that you would insert into the back of your motor home here. So if you we're looking at the cable that you we're gonna insert into the motor home, the top left one here is your brown. Well, it's gonna be for this brown wire. It may not be brown in your seven way but it's the same function. It's taillight, which is your brown wire. We moved one more over from that. That's going to be the left turn signal which on ours is gonna be this yellow wire here. And it may not be yellow on yours. Oftentimes it's red on a lot of these seven poles. If you move another one over, down going in the circle there, that's going to be the ground circuit which is the white wire here and is often still white on the seven way. And then we have to go all the way around, over to this one here over on the side, that's gonna be for our right turn signal, which is the green wire in our assembly here. And it may not be green on yours, a lot of times it's brown on a seven way. But you would just wanna add those colors in. So we'll just hit that one more time. Taillights, brown, left turn, yellow, ground, white, and the opposite side over here is right turn, green. So we're now here at the back of our motor home and we need to get the four way round connector mounted up. It doesn't come with any mounting bracket or anything like that. So you will have to provide your own solution. A lot of times at the back of these motor homes, you could just drill out a hole about an inch and a quarter and you can slide this through and just directly mount it into the material if you want. But if you don't wanna modify your vehicle, you can buy these brackets here. You can get these here at E-trailer. There's actually two brackets we're using here. One of them is this long bracket here on top that uses a clamp to clamp it around your hitch. That way you don't have to modify the vehicle and you can get an ice bracket. The other bracket that we've got located here is actually for a six way connector, but the four way round that comes in this kit also lines up very nicely with this bracket. You can get these both here E-trailer. We're now gonna mount up our connector. So we decided to just wire ours to a four flat so we can plug it into an adapter instead of hardwiring it. But we did show you the steps there. So if you did wanna hard wire it, you can. And if you already have a connector here at the back and all, honestly, I recommend that you just get the adapter rather than wiring in this. This is just nice that it comes with it if you don't have something like this at the back. So we'll just line that up. There you see the holes line up in the bracket, we'll then secure it with the hardware that comes included with the bracket. So just slide the screw through and then put the nut on the other side. We're gonna do the same thing over on the other side of our four round here. And we'll just screw that one in. And then we'll snug 'em down with a 10 millimeter socket. And a lot of times you can just hold the screw as you tighten. It looks like in this case, I'm not gonna be able to, sometimes you can just hold it and just tighten it. If not, then you might need to stick a screwdriver in there and you can tighten it down with a screwdriver in a 10 millimeter ranch or we're gonna be using a 10 millimeter socket here. So at this point now, all that would be left would just be to plug it in and then set our lights on top. Before we plug it in though, I just wanted to show you the couple of features on our lights here before we get 'em set up. So we got the one on the right here. This is what it looks like when it's assembled. So we did remove the snap ring that holds the lens cover in, just pops out of there. And then we can pull our lens and the gasket off to the side. And there, you can see your in candescent bulb inside. So if you need to replace it down the road, maybe five, 10 years down the road, maybe your bulb burns out, you need to replace it. That's how you would get that out of there. And once you've taken care of any maintenance or something, cause you might also want that 'cause maybe bugs are there, they get inside of there. Maybe you're just cleaning it out. So now we're gonna go ahead and reinstall the snap ring. So you can see there, we're gonna get this side in first. And then we got the notch that we can use on this side to help us pop it in over there. And there we go. Our snap ring's back in. It's pretty easy getting it in and out. And that's what holds our lens there and prevents any moisture from getting inside. All right, so now we can go ahead and set 'em up on the vehicle. The one with the single wire going to it is gonna be the passenger, our right side. And the one with the two wires is going to be our driver, our left side. So now we know which light is which. We're gonna just stick 'em in place at any magnetic surface that you've got on the vehicle. On our GP here, we do gotta put 'em down a little bit low, but they are near where the factory lights are. So they should still work out fine for us. Get those set up on each side. And then the remaining wiring that we've got left, we'll need to route towards the front of the vehicle, so we can plug into our connector. And now we're just routing our connector up. We're gonna use this channel here on our Jeep to keep it up off the road there. If you don't have something like that, what you could do is you could route it and pinch it into like one of your weather stripping pieces. Now that could potentially cause moisture to enter in the vehicle. So if you're doing that and it's raining out, I wouldn't recommend that method. You could use cable ties and secure it to door latches, whatever you have available to you, but we're gonna run it up here like this. And then we're actually just gonna use our mirror here to support it. We'll give it a couple loops around the mirror. And then we'll just bring the rest of our cable up towards the front. We'll probably tuck it underneath a wiper blade. Help bring it towards the front. And once we get our connector routed up here to the front, we simply need to plug it in. And then we're ready to operate our lights and verify everything's working properly. You did have to turn the key on. So there is a little beep here, but you can see that we've got our left turn signal, our right turn signal, our tail lamps, and our brake lamps, and all of our signals are working properly. So we are ready to hit the road. And that'll complete our look at buyers magnetic towing light kit..