Demco Stay-IN-Play DUO Braking System Installation - 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Products Featured in this Video

Demco SBS Stay-IN-Play DUO Supplemental Braking System - Proportional

504 reviews

Code: SM99251

Retail: $1,585.79

Price:  $1,175.00

• Tow Bar Braking Systems
• Brake Systems
• Proportional System
• One Time Set-Up

• Fixed System
• Power Assist Brake Compatible
• Hydraulic Brakes
• Demco

Get automatic, proportional braking with a system that never has to be removed, replaced, or reset. The DUO activates when your RV's brake lights go on and an inertia sensor in the towed car detects deceleration. No false braking.

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How to Install the Demco Stay-IN-Play DUO Braking System on a 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

Hi there Jeep owners. Today in your 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, we're going to be taking a look at and showing you how to install. Stay-IN-Play DUO supplemental braking system. There are five main components you're going to need to flat tow your vehicle. So in addition to your braking system, you're also going to need your tow bar, which provides the connection between your motor home and your vehicle, your safety cables, which is the supplemental connection in addition to your tow bar, your baseplate, which provides that connection point on your vehicle side, and either your diode wiring or magnetic lights, however you want to transfer your lighting signals from your motor home to the back of your vehicle so people around you know your intentions when going down the road. We're now all hooked up to our motor home.

We're going to hit the brakes and you can see here in the vehicle that it's going to apply it using the actuator attached to the brake pedal.In addition to the brake pedal applying, you'll also see the indicator on the back of the mirror illuminate. Now, many customers ask, "Well, do I even need a braking system" Well, in addition to making it legal for you to flat tow your vehicle in all states, I'll give you a scenario of why you're braking system's important. It's particularly important in heavy terrain where you're going up and down hills. When coming down hills, especially if it's a long steep grade, this whole time, your vehicle is pushing on the back of your motor home. And your motor home's brakes are doing all the work.

This can cause the brakes to heat up in your motor home and start to fade. This loss in braking performance could potentially get worse and worse as you're going down the Hill. It could eventually lead to damage to the brakes on your motor home.By placing brakes on your vehicle, you remove all that weight that was pushing on your motor home by using the existing brakes that's on your vehicle to make it seamlessly go down the hill as if you we're just driving your motor home. This will extend the life of all of your components as well as make it safer for you and your family. One of the things that I really like about this braking system is that it's a truly proportional system.

It monitors the brake signal from your motor home electronically through your wiring. And once it sees that, it uses the internal and inertia sensor inside of the control unit located in the vehicle to determine the appropriate amount of brake pressure to apply to the brakes to help it come to a smooth stop.If it wasn't proportional, when you would get that signal, it would just apply the brakes to a set them out. And that could cause jarring and it wouldn't feel comfortable. With proportional, it feels very natural when driving your motor home. Now we are using a Stay-IN-Play DUO on our Jeep here, but the system you want to choose is going to be somewhat dependent upon your motor home.

Our motor home here has regular hydraulic brakes, making the Stay-IN-Play a great option. But if your motor home has air brakes, you would want to choose a different option that's designed specifically to work with air brakes. This is due to the way engine breaking works. And if it's not a setup that is designed to work with air brakes, it could potentially apply the brakes and appropriately with your air brakes on your motor home. I would recommend Air Force One, which is specifically designed for air brakes if you have air brakes on your motor home.On the side of your control unit here, you'll have your sensitivity adjustment. You can adjust the sensitivity by loosening the knob and then pressing it up or down. Down is more sensitive, up is less sensitive. You'll want to tweak this before you take off to make sure that your brakes aren't applied when you're just sitting still. So that way, you're not excessively using the brakes in your vehicle. An easy way to adjust this is to turn on the flashers in your motor home. While hooked up, the flashes will repeatedly apply the brake pedal if the sensitivity is too high. So you simply just move it up until it stops applying the brake pedal. Give yourself another about an eighth of an inch up past that point, and then go ahead and screw it and lock it down.This is a great starting point. And from here, you'll just want to feel it out as you're driving down the highway and make subtle adjustments from there. We'll begin our installation by mounting all of the major components. One of the first things you're going to need to mount is your control box and your operating unit. We'll start with the operating unit because that's the biggest piece. The engine compartment is extremely cramped, so there's no place for us to put the box because it is so large. So we're going to go underneath and mount it down below. We're underneath the front of the vehicle now. I did remove some of the bolts for the under shield here, just underneath your bumper, just to give us some more access up in here. And we mounted the control box right onto the backside of our base plate. We used a couple of self-tapping screws to get it mounted up. Now, these didn't come with the kit, but you can pick some up here at etrailer.com.And while you're down here, you can go ahead and mount your breakaway switch. We also mounted this to the base plate, using a self tapping screw. Now you'll notice here that our breakaway switch does come forward and we had to cut our panel out in order for it to poke through as we're going to need to access this to hook up our cable when we're going to flat tow. Here, you can see where the other end of our breakaway switch comes out through the panel right next to our six pole connector. Next, we mounted our control box. We're on the driver's side and the lower left kick panel. And we just used the included screws to run it into the panel to hold it there. You want to make note that there are two panels down here, reason the one closer to the firewall, this other smaller panel here is used for accessing the door strap so you can take the door off. So I wouldn't recommend putting it on there.If you plan on taking your doors off in the future.Here, we connected the brake pedal actuator. This attaches directly to your brake pedal. The bar and nuts and screws come pre-attached. So you'll just loosen those up, slide it over your brake pedal and then split the plate on. And re-install those. Now these ones you don't need to tighten really that tight. I actually don't use any tools when I tighten them down. I just use the socket without a ratchet or anything on it and I just do it by hand. That's going to be plenty tight, cause you don't really want to bend it too much. And if you do it by hand, you're going to flex it and bend it just a little bit. And that's going to be plenty to keep it securely attached to your brake pedal.Coming out of the back of our cylinder, you're going to have a cable and this cable has an anchor on it here. This attaches to your firewall using the included self-tapping screw. And when installing this, you want to make sure that you have a straight line from the back of your brake pedal actuator to the anchor, so that way it's pulling it straight. And the last thing that comes in your kit that you will need to mount is the LEF indicator that goes on the backside of the mirror. Just pull off the adhesive backing, stick it onto the mirror. And then we just routed the cable down by just pulling this back and pushing the wiring up, going down our driver's side. And then we did the same thing going down our pillar until we came out down at the lower left paneling down there where our control box is so we can get everything wired up down there.Now, an additional component you are going to need in order to make your LED indicator work is a brake light switch. We're using Roadmasters universal brake light switch. And this attaches directly to your pedal. It's got adhesive backing that just sticks on there and some zip ties to secure it. And what I like about this switch is you just have to run power and ground to it. And then there's a third wire, which is the output. In this case, that output wire's going to connect to the positive of our LED light in order to make a turn on. Normally, you would just tap into your existing brake light switch on your Jeep. But with the newer model that we have here, it doesn't have the appropriate output voltage to make our LED work properly so we had to add the secondary switch. You can pick up this switch here at etrailer.com.Now. We can route all the wiring from our control box here, inside the vehicle, outside the vehicle so we can make the proper connections. All of our wiring came out through the grommet located just to the driver's side of your vacuum brake booster. You can see it down there. I popped that grommet out and then I used a drill bit to drill a hole in it as it's a plastic grommet. So it's not rubber, so you can't just poke them through. A half inch drill bit's probably going to be plenty fine for you to get all your wiring through. So all of our wiring from our control box we then pulled through. I do recommend that while you're pulling that through, you also run an additional wire. This wire is for that universal stoplight switch that we just talked about, and this is the power wire for that switch. Also included in your kit, you're going to receive airline hose. You can see that here. This needs to go from the brake actuator cylinder mounted on the pedal and then to the operating unit underneath. So while you're routing things through this grommet, go ahead and route your hose through that as well.Once you routed that hose through, you can plug it into your actuating cylinder and that way you know you're not going to accidentally pull it out through your grommet. Here's the wiring that came from our control unit inside that we pulled out. We routed those up to our control box here. Now, most of these wiring are going to be hooking in a couple of different places. The black and the red wire are going to connect directly to the black and red wire coming out of our control box. Now, instead of using the included butt connectors, we did upgrade all of our butt connectors to heat shrink butt connectors like you see here to ensure a long lasting connection, because it keeps out any moisture from entering in there causing corrosion.The yellow, the green, and the white wire coming off of the control box will tap into either your diode wiring or your taillight wiring, whichever you've got installed. We're going to be using magnetic lights on this system. So we tapped into the wiring for that. The yellow wire is your left turn signal, the green wire is your right turn signal, and white is ground. So you want to make sure that you've got the white wire grounded if you haven't already grounded it when you installed your diodes or your other system. You can see here that we took those and attached them together. So there's the white and the white, the yellow and the yellow, the green and the green.The other end of our butt connectors here are going to our six pole connector in the front. And that's where our motor home is going to be attached electrically. We'll take our six pole end, plug it in here. We're going to plug our seven pole in, into our motor home. And this way, all of those lighting signals are going to transfer here. And whenever we get a brake signal, that's going to go off to our control unit there to let the braking system know that it is time to activate. A brake signal's determined by getting both a left and right turn signal impulse at the same time. Here, you can see our diode wiring and the wiring coming from our control box are spliced together on one end of our butt connector. Same with the yellow wires and the white wires. There is no brown coming through control box, so your diode or magnetic lights won't have one.The other end of these butt connectors continue on to our six pole connector. And our six pole connector is our connection point, will plug in to connect our vehicle to our motor home to transfer all those signals electronically. Your six pole connector is not going to come with your braking system kit. This typically comes with either your diode wiring, or in our case, it comes with our Nighthawk tow bar. Your breakaway switch has two wires coming off of it. You'll have a blue wire as well as an orange and brown wire. The blue wire just connects to the blue wire coming off of your operating unit here. And the orange wire, you can see here, the orange and brown, this wire here is going to connect to battery positive.So what I did here, it's not very long. So it's difficult to kind of see, but the brown wire coming off of our operating unit also needs to go to power. So kind of like what we did over here, where you see these two wires, we have the orange and brown going in, and then the brown going in, where we splice those two together. And then the single brown wire goes up towards our battery. The airline tube that we ran through the firewall and plugged into the brake actuating cylinder, that needs to be routed. You can just follow your wiring and it plugs into our operating unit here.And this is just a quick connect, just like it was in the cylinder, so it simply just pushes in. It's highly recommended that you use the appropriate cutters when cutting your airline and your vacuum line tubing, because if you just use regular sidecutters, it's going to squish it before it cuts it and deforms the end. And it may not seal properly inside the quick connect. You can pick up a set of hose cutters and I used the razor blade on one side with a flat surface, which gives us a nice clean cut every time. And it's just easier to get a square cut so that way it's flat when it's inserted into the quick connect.While we're down here, we can route the hose that comes in our kit from our operating unit up to the engine compartment where we'll tap it in. I recommend using some silicone lubricant to spray it on the check valve here that's pre-installed in the operating unit that makes it easier to slide this tubing on. That hose is going to route up into our engine compartment and we want to route it near our brake boosters vacuum line. That's going to be located right here. You can see this clip. You can cut it really anywhere on this line, but I recommend giving yourself a place where you've got a little room to work and also a decent stretch of straight hose so you can have enough room to get your tee in there.So this is the line here that's coming from our operating unit coming up the bottom into our T. The T then spreads. You've used small portions of the hose that we ran up. So just cut off some small chunks like this, about an inch and a half. Slide it onto the T, the other end slides onto the factory vacuum line that we cut, and then secured using the hose clamp. The other end of our T uses another small piece of hose like we cut before, and then we need to put a check valve in there where we want to have the black portion of the check valve going towards the engine, and the white/greenish kind of color towards our T.Once again, we cut another small piece of hose. We slide it on the other end of the check valve and the other end slides right back onto our factory vacuum linea again, using another hose clamp. The brown wire that we routed up is going to connect the power. You receive a fuse harness with your kit, which will provide you a circuit protection. So if there is any shorts from the future, the fuse will pop and you'll be able to just replace it. You see another black wire coming off of here where our brown wire is connected in. This black wire also needs power. This one we added, this is the power wire that we ran inside for that extra brake light switch that we need to make our LED operate. We then connected our butt connector to our fuse harness here, and the other end of our fuse harness, we attached a ring terminal and then connected it to our battery positive here. You can remove the nut here with a 10 millimeter socket, slide the ring terminal that you crimped on onto the stud, and then reinstall the nut.Your fuse harness is going to come empty without the fuse installed. You will receive the fuse with your kit, but I recommend that you leave it out at this time and install it as the very last step, because when you're working with wiring, you don't want to cause any shorts. And if that fuse isn't installed, current is not going to be able to travel from our battery positive to the rest of the system. The LEF that comes in your kit has a black and a red wire. The red wire is going to connect to the cold side of your brake switch. So we added this extra universal stoplight switch. So this will connect to that in this instance. Our universal stoplight switch has three wires. It has a red, a black and a blue, the red connects to battery positive. That was at black wire you saw that we had ran out there just a minute ago to our fuse harness.The black wire just runs to ground. And we actually just attach that right here to the existing bolt was there, just put a ring terminal on it and attached that there. And then the blue wire coming off of it attaches to the red wire coming off of your LED indicator. You can see that crimped on right there. Now. The black wire coming off of your LED indicator, that actually needs to attach to the black wire coming off of your control box. The reason for this is if you we're to just attach it to ground, every time you pressed your brake pedal, that LED indicator would come out on the backside of your mirror. If you attached to the black wire coming off of your control box here, it will only work when you had the switch turned on on the control box. It should only be turned on when you're in flat tow mode and you're flat towing your vehicle.When you're not flat towing it, you turn it off. This also kills that LED light. Once you finished making all those connections, we can now insert our fuse to test the system out. Make sure you turn your control box on inside the vehicle and pull your breakaway switch pin. You should then hear the unit operate and the led should illuminate on the backside of your mirror. It's a good idea to have a second set of eyes watch your pedal to make sure that it's pulling it straight right back into your anchor pin. You can see it operating there and it pulls it right back. And when you re insert the pin, the system disengages. And that completes our look at Stay-IN-Play DUO supplemental braking system on your 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited..