Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2007 Honda Pilot
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How to Install a Trailer Brake Controller on a 2007 Honda Pilot
Today in this 2007 Honda Pilot, we're going to install brake controller using part number ETBC-7. The brake controller we're going to use at the end to install will be part number 90885, the Tekonsha Prodigy P2 Brake Controller. To start off our install, we need to get our 4 pole free from its mount. We'll go ahead and remove from the bracket and get it pushed out away for now. Then we'll install a new bracket for our ETBC-7 kit. The bracket we're going to use to attach our 7 pole to the hitch will be 18136.
We'll go ahead and attach that to the hitch. We'll go ahead and take the bracket from the ETBC-7 kit and we'll attach it to our first bracket using the hardware provided in the kit.When we install our bracket for our 7 pole connector, we're going to flip it around and install it backwards. This way the 7 pole connector will recess a little bit further back and match the edge of the hitch that's already installed. Then we'll take our 7 pole connector and attach it to our bracket using the hardware provided in the kit. We'll use some electrical tape and some loom material to help clean it up.
There are two wires that we're going to tape up will be a white and a purple wire. Our white wire will run to ground in the frame eventually and our purple wire will be used for our future upgrade either reverse slides or a secondary circuit of some sort.We'll go ahead and plug the two 4 pole ends together. We'll also apply some dielectric grease to help protect the contacts and make it a semi-permanent connection. The part number for the grease is 11755. In our white wire, we'll go directly to ground.
After our 4 poles are connected, we'll go ahead and work with the 2 leads that are black and blue. We're going to take the gray cable that comes with our ETBC-7 and connect it to these wires. The cable has a black and white wire inside. We'll run it black to black and white to blue. We'll go ahead and make our connections and tape them up to help seal them.Then we'll go ahead and start running our gray cable up towards the front of the vehicle.
We're going to be running over the rear suspension to just help hold everything up for a while. Now, also to help hold up the wires, we'll be using some aluminum clamps, part number A0500. Then we'll go ahead and start running our gray cable up towards the front of our vehicle up by our firewall and towards our battery. When we run our wire towards the front we're going to stay away from anything moving like suspension components or anything hot like the exhaust.In this case, we went by the rear suspension over the top, we ran along the brake cable going away towards the front. This is the parking brake cable. To make pulling the wire up easier from the engine compartment, it's a good idea to use a piece of stiff wire or in this case we use a piece of airline tubing to run it down first, tape it to our gray cable and then pull it up. Once you pull it through the top, we'll go ahead and take out all our slack. We'll stop working with the wire for now and find a location for our circuit breakers. We need to use two. One will be a 40-amp circuit breaker for our hot lead which should be a black wire.This will eventually provide a 12-volt power supply to the 7 pole connector. Then we're going to use a 20-amp circuit breaker prudential use with the brake controller. With our circuit breakers installed, we'll go ahead and start working with our wire again. We're going to route our wire up and towards our circuit breakers and then we're going to route it underneath the intake then the positive side of the battery. Make a marker in the wire so we know where to make an opening in the wire to connect our black wire eventually to our positive side of our battery.We'll break open the cable and get it to the black wire and add some ring terminals and connect it to our 40-amp circuit breakers. Now, our connection to the battery will be one of the last things we do so we'll leave it off for now. Then use the rest of the cable to pull our white wire into the inside. With these connections made, we'll go ahead and route our wire to the inside of the vehicle. We're going to use a grommet the cable going through already that's above the gas pedal off to the right hand side. We'll go ahead and make a slit in it then we'll go ahead and run our cable from the outside to the inside.We'll go ahead and use our piece of airline tubing to help pull it through. We'll pull what we need and take up the rest of the slack. Once we have enough material to work with so we can attach it to our brake controller wiring harness, we'll cut it off short. With the wire we have now, we only need the white wire. We'll go ahead and strip back the sheet and get back to our white wire and cut our black wire short. Because the other half is black wire, it doesn't go anywhere anymore. We will know this will be our outlet from our brake controller. With the rest of our cable, we'll go ahead and run it back through the grommet up to our circuit breakers.At this point, we'll end up with two wires underneath the dash where the gray cable with black and white together and our single white wire. We'll go back up to our circuit breaker. The black wire will connect to our 20-amp circuit breaker and our white wire will go directly to ground. On this install, we ran a little short on wiring so we need to use an extra length of 10-gauge wire. We'll continue on from our circuit breaker to the positive side of our battery. With all the wires ran inside the vehicle, we'll go ahead and get our brake control wire harness ready to go.First off, we'll bundle our wires together using the remaining loom material that we have and then we'll go ahead and add our butt connectors. We'll go ahead and add butt connectors to the wires now. We'll put them on the white black and blue wires then we'll trim off our red wire that will end up using a different type of connector. We'll go underneath the dash and hook up our wires using a two-black and white wires, we'll connect up color for color so black to black, white to white. Our single white wire will connect up to our blue wire. Our red wire needs to go through our brake lights switch. We need to use the wire that's only hot when the brake pedals touch.We'll go ahead and test the switch. In this case we're able to probe and check in the back of the switch to get it to contact. In this case we found out that our brake signal is going to be a white wire with the black stripe and silver bands. To make our connection we'll use a quick splice connector that comes with the ETBC-7 kit. We'll put the connector on our brake wire first and then we'll slide our red wire inside and then we'll go ahead and close it together using a pair of pliers. Once we're done, it's a good idea to check our connection at the other end.Now, we'll go through with the brake controller. We'll go ahead and use the pocket that comes with the brake controller and we'll attach it to the bottom of the dash. We'll use one of the screws that go ahead and attach it to the dash first then we'll use our brake controller to help align it. Once we're satisfied with the placement we'll go ahead and take the brake controller out and put the second screw in for our pocket. We'll go ahead and take our wire harness and run it from behind the pocket and on the top and plug into our brake controller. Then we'll snap the brake controller back into the pocket.At this point, we'll go ahead and take some time to zip tie our wires make sure it's safe and secured and out of the way. First, we'll go ahead and make our final connection to the battery. We'll take our two ring terminals and connect it to the positive side of the battery. Let's go check our brake controller. We got two dots. That will show us that there's power on and one of the boost functions is turned on. We'll hit the manual override and it should say NC for no connection. We'll go ahead and plug it in the trailer. When we plug in, we'll get a C4 connection. Then we'll try to manual override one more time and you can see how it scrolls to the numbers.We can also adjust the gain at the same time. That's working just fine. We'll go ahead and press the brake pedals and we'll get some numbers to show up there as well. That tells us we got signal from our brake pedal. It looks like everything is working. With that, that'll finish it for our install of the ETBC-7 kit and our brake controller the Prodigy P2 from Tekonsha, part number 90885 on our 2007 Honda Pilot. .
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Brian S.
1/10/2019
Hello, I have a 2008 Pilot with my 4 pole trailer harness inside the Pilot in the storage compartment. Whenever I need to tow a trailer with a 4 pole connector I open the rear hatch and run the cable outside to the trailer. I want to add the 7 pole to my Pilot for a camper but would I just leave the 4 pole harness inside the vehicle when I am not towing the camper? I still want to be able to use my 4 pole for towing a trailer and do not want to leave it connected to my 7 pole harness all the time. Should I still use the ETB7 kit and just leave the 4 pole harness disconnected and stored inside when not in use?Thanks,Brian