Roadmaster 4-Diode Universal Wiring Kit Installation - 2020 Jeep Wrangler

Products Featured in this Video

Roadmaster 4-Diode Universal Wiring Kit for Towed Vehicles - 7-Wire to 6-Wire Straight Cord

237 reviews

Code: RM-152-98146-7

Price:  $182.35

• Tow Bar Wiring
• Splices into Vehicle Wiring
• Diode Kit

• Universal
• Tail Light Mount
• Roadmaster

This complete kit includes everything you need to connect your RV's tail, brake, and turn signal lights to your towed car. Diodes prevent feedback and wire your car to operate as a combined system. Includes a 7-way to 6-way straight adapter cord.

Do you have a question about part RM-152-98146-7?more information >     

How to Install the Roadmaster 4-Diode Universal Wiring Kit on a 2020 Jeep Wrangler

Connor: Hey everybody. Connor here today at etrailer.com. We're going to be going over and showing you how to install the Roadmaster Diode Wiring Kit, here for our 2020 Jeep Wrangler. So here we have the base plates installed on our Jeep. There are actually a few other things you may need to flat tow the vehicle. A few of these things are, number one, a supplemental braking system.

This is required in most states. It's not an actual requirement to flat tow, but many states do have stipulation based on the weight of the towed vehicle. Some other things you'll need is a tow bar, which we already talked about. Some safety cables, as well as a lighting system to power the lights on the vehicle to let others know behind you what your signals are.So this is what our wiring harness is going to look like installed. As you can see here, we're going to be utilizing the factory tail lights.

Now, what this means is, we're not going to have any other lights on the vehicle like magnetic tail lights that you may stick up top, which for this vehicle, since it has the fiberglass roof, isn't actually going to work and you don't have to worry about the wires dangling down the roof and hood of your car. We're going to have a nice clean finished install look, utilizing the factory tail lights. So we talked about the magnetic tail lights as not really being a good option for this vehicle. There is however, a few more that may work, which is a bulb and socket kit, which actually requires drilling into the tail light housing. However, I really don't prefer these because if you have to change the bulb, you have to break the seal and you risk getting water or dirt and corrosion inside the tail light housing.

There's also a lot of room for air when you're drilling.So I truly feel this style that uses the diodes is going to be our best option. We're not going to have to worry about damaging the vehicle's wiring either because the diodes are going to stop the back feed of electricity. Meaning we don't have to worry about power being sent to the factory tail light circuits and causing any damage. So here we have our straight cable connector, it's our umbilical cord. On this end, we have a seven-way, which is going to attach to our motor home.

And on this end, we have a six-way, which attaches to our towed vehicle. Now keep in mind, you do need to attach this connector here, but there'll be some instructions that'll easily show you how to do this. In order to hook up to our motor home, all we need to do is take our connector here. We're going to have a six-way on the front here. You can simply press that in to lock it into place and we can take the seven-way here. And this one is going to go on our motor home.And this is going to provide us with all our basic trailer lighting functions, such as the stop and turn signal circuits, as well as the running lights. I do like to point out something really nice about this kit here, is that it has a extra pin here due to its six- to seven-way capability, which is going to allow us to run eight battery charge line, should we choose to do so. So in regards to installation, it's pretty simple and straightforward. The bulk of the install is going to be routing the bonded four pole wiring harness from the front of the vehicle here to the rear. We actually ran ours in the frame, so we don't have to worry about it interfering with any of the other vehicle's existing components. So keep in mind, we do have to splice into a few of the vehicle's tail light circuits, but it's only a few per side.It's not really going to be a big deal. And again, we don't have to worry about any lighting issues transferring over to our vehicle here due to the integrated diodes. So now that we've gone over some of the benefits and features of the diode wiring kit here, let's go ahead and jump right in to that installation. So we can show you guys how to do it yourself. So the first step of our installation here, we want to take the bonded four pole wiring harness that comes with our kit here, and we're going to tie it off to the front of our base plate kit. Now it really doesn't matter which side. However, after looking under the vehicle here, this particular model has a turbo engine. So the exhaust is going to be on the driver's side and it's going to get really hot. So we want to try to avoid that as much as possible.Therefore, I think we're going to tie off to the base plate kit here, the safety chain tab in particular, over here on the passenger side. That way we can run it down the passenger side frame rail to the rear of the vehicle, into our tail lights. So what we're going to do now is, we're going to loop our wiring harness here around this safety chain tab, and then we're going to tie it off. Now you want to be careful and make sure you leave yourself plenty of extra wire, even more than you may think you need. That way, it gives us a little bit more freedom as to where we want to mount our electrical connector.So now that we've tied that off, let's go ahead and route this wiring harness back to the rear of the vehicle. We'll do that now and we'll show you the path we took.So you can see here, we have the coiled bonded wire coming straight from our base plate kit and tucked in behind her splash panel here.Then when we come underneath the vehicle, you're going to be able to see the black loom, this wire loom that comes with our kit here. We have it covered for the first section of the wire. We have a zip tie up here, securing it to an AC line. We have another one up at the top there to get it away from the differential here. So once we've come over our differential here, you can see our wire, where our wire loom ends. We have it zip tied to the bracket for our brake lines. So we have this little access hole here, and we have it ran inside the frame here all the way down the vehicle.Up and over the rear axle inside the frame, we have it coming out here on the outboard side of our frame rail here, you can see the wire coming out. So essentially, how we we're able to snake this wire in through the frame is we took a piece of airline tubing, and there's going to be several access holes at varying points in the frame. So we just snuck the airline tubing through, pulled it out one end about three or four foot sections is all you're going to be working with at a time. Then we can tie the end of our wiring harness to this, pull section through the frame and just repeat this process until we get to the rear here.So now that we have our wiring harness run to the rear here, we can go ahead and open the tailgate here and come in our rear hatch area. So if we come in here to either the driver or passenger side, directly behind our tail light assemblies, we're going to have these little panels here. We need to go ahead and remove them, just using a pick tool. And then there's going to be a 10 millimeter screw in there that we'll remove in order to remove the tail light housing.So once we have our screw removed, we should be able to pull the tail light housing off and off the body. We'll turn it around to the back here. We'll go ahead and remove the connector. Yours may look a little bit different. We actually have an aftermarket trailer wiring harness installed in here, which is why you see this extra connector, but the principles should be the same in removing the factory one. If you don't have this, we'll depress on that clip there, we should be able to pull it away from the factory connector here.Now we can go ahead and set it aside. We'll repeat this process on the other side as well. We see we have this black sheaving here, not to be confused with the wires that are running to our trailer wiring harness, which is an aftermarket component you may not have. So just go ahead and forget the rest of these wires here. What we're going to be working with is the factory connector here, we see we have this black fabric tape. Now it's kind of difficult to get off, but we need to go ahead and remove about five or six inches of this because we're going to be splicing our diodes in line with this harness here. We also need to be really careful removing it because if we use a razor blade, we don't want to pierce the jacket on any of our wires here. So we're just going to take our time. We're going to do this on both sides. We're just going to carefully start to peel back this fabric tape until we expose enough of our wires to work with.So what we're going to do next is in order to identify the correct wires we need to splice into, we need to go ahead and test the pins here with a circuit tester. Now, if you guys are doing this at home, we're going to save you some trouble here and pretty much skip this step, because we're going to tell you what all the circuits are. We've already went ahead and tested the driver's side, stop/turn signal circuit. That's going to be this yellow wire here. We have the running lights on now, we're going to go ahead and test those.So there's actually going to be two pins that are going to illuminate that running light circuit. That's because if we take a look at the tail lights on our Jeep here, we're going to have two different running light bulbs, one on the outside here, one the center. One, we want to splice into the center one, and we've already went ahead and followed our wires here. But the one we're going to be slicing into is going to be the white wire with the gray stripe.So again, we're going to save you guys some work at home and just do this step for you and tell you what wire colors you need to use. We're going to go ahead and repeat this process on the passenger side to get the correct wire colors. So now that we've tested our connectors and got all of our wire colors, we need to go ahead and take the bonded four pole that we ran to the rear of the vehicle earlier. And we need to pull that up behind our tail light housing here in this little pocket, in order to do that, we're going to take a piece of airline tubing, and there's going to be a little access hole. One on either side, we should be able to start to see some daylight. If we look in there, we're just going to feed our pole wire down through there, and we should start to see it come out below.So now that we have our pole wire down here, we'll go ahead, just tape our wiring harness to this, that way we can take the other end of the pole wire, pull it back up through that hole and bring our wiring harness into the tail light pocket. In order to stop our wire from falling back down into that hole, we're going to go ahead and use a zip tie and tie it all into our factory harness. So now we're going to go ahead and make our first connection here. We're going to be on the passenger side here using the green wire, which is for the stop/turn signal circuit. I'm going to go ahead and cut this wire pretty much in half in regards to the length of that sheathing that we took out. Let's go ahead and cut that.Now we can go ahead and strip some jacket back on each of those wires here, about a quarter of an eighth inch should be plenty. Do that on both sides. Then we can go ahead and attach our diodes via the spade connectors. Now what we're going to do next is, we're going to take the green wire within our bonded four pole wire harness here. We're going to separate that from the other wires.So now once we have our green wire separated, I'm going to go ahead and cut off some of the excess here. Pretty much line it up with our factory one there.Now we'll go ahead and cut some of the sheathing off or the wire jacket, whatever you want to call it. We'll attach another one of our blue spade terminals. And then we can go ahead and take one of our diodes with our kit here and attach it. You have the one lit 00:11:48 end labeled out. That's going to go to the factory tail light connector and then the other two will line up on either pin there. It doesn't matter. Before we do that, though, when I always like to do with these diode kits, sometimes the spades are a little loose. So what we go ahead and do is, take a pair of pliers and just crimp them down.It gives them a little bit of a tighter fit, helps to ensure they don't fall out. And again, it doesn't matter which pin goes to, which just those as long as they're on the correct side. So now the next thing we're going to do is, if you remember, we tested the running light circuit for the center light on our tail light. We found that to be the white/orange wire. So we're going to go ahead and repeat the same process on this as well. I would have ever like to note, we are going to have one additional wire we need to connect. We'll show you that soon.So we just told you about the extra step here for the tail light circuit. So what we're going to do is, we're going to take the extra wire that we just cut off from the bonded four full wire 00:13:06 , which was our brown wire. We're going to take that. And we're going to tie that in with our circuit there, that we just cut off from. The reason for this is we need to make a jumper wire for the running light circuit, which goes onto the other side of the vehicle. So the only thing different we're really doing is we're just attaching another wire. And instead of the blue spade terminals, we're going to get one yellow spade. That's the one we're going to use for our two conjoined wires. Now we can go ahead and attach our diode.Now to secure our diodes here, we're going to take the adhesive backing off of them. There'll be one on each side here. Once we remove that, we're just going to stick them together. Just like this.So now we have a few wires left here. What we're going to do is we're going to take out the white wire now. This is going to be for the ground. So what we can do is go ahead and separate that so it's not intertwined with our diodes here, but basically we're going to be cutting this, cutting our excess off here.And then what we can do is, we're going to go ahead and crimp on a ring terminal here that comes with our kit. So we're going to go ahead and ground that inside to the body.We're going to get a self-tapping screw that comes with our kit and really anywhere we find suitable, we can go ahead and attach them. And there we go. So now finally, we're going to have our yellow and brown wires, which need to be ran over to the driver's side. So what I'm going to do is, since we had to separate them, it's going to take some electrical tape. It's going to tape them up so they both go over there. We don't have to worry about running two separate wires. We can just run them as one together. So we'll take our two wires here. We'll just feed them back down through the hole that we ran our bonded four pole up earlier. We'll go down underneath and grab the rest of the wire and pull it through. So while we're still over here, before we go ahead and run our wires to the other side, we'll just go ahead and make our connection and reinstall our tail light.So we had our wire dropped down here and all we did is we're going to see this cross tube here, which is directly behind our rear bumper fascia. And we just ran the wire on the top of this cross tube with some zip ties to hold it along the way. We need to be careful that it doesn't fall back onto our muffler here, as the heat from that will damage our wire. But we came all the way over there. Then over the side of the frame, now we have it hanging down here.What we're going to do is we're going to go back up top. We're going to use the piece of airline tubing. We're going to fish it down the tail light pocket, tie it off underneath here and pull our wire back up and through. So now that we're on the driver's side, we'll just go ahead and mirror connections that we made on the other side, with the new wire colors, the yellow wire is for the stop/turn signal circuit. And then the white wire with the gray stripe is going to be for the tail lights. So let's go ahead and make those connections.And now that we have our diodes installed, go ahead and just reinstall our other tail light here. So the final step of our installation here would be to go ahead and wire up our trailer connector here. Now we've got the wiring harness ran over here, slightly askew to around the center of our base plate kit here, which is roughly where we're going to attach our trailer connector. But we need something to attach the bracket that houses our trailer connector to on the vehicle. We don't really want to drill into the cross tube here. So we've got a pretty good option for you guys. We sell these kits here at etrailer.com, But it's just a no-drill mounting bracket, pretty simple and basic item. And what this does is, it's actually going to clamp on to the base plate here. We're going to secure it with this band clamp and we can mount our trailer connector mounting bracket straight to this. So I'd definitely recommend you guys pick up one of these kits here.We'll go ahead and attach that now. We'll go ahead and connect to the bracket that comes with our kit here to the no-drill bracket that we just installed. We're going to be tightening this down with a Phillips head screwdriver and a three-eights inch wrench. So the next thing we're going to do is we just took our bonded four pole, routed it under the cross tube and through the opening in our bracket. We're going to take the boot off of our trailer connector. We're going to go ahead and slide that on now. So we don't forget it. And what we can do is, we'll take all this extra wire here. We'll just go ahead and trim that. Now we'll go ahead and just strip some jacket off our wires and attach them to their correct terminals in the back of our trailer connector. So we'll go ahead and just secure all our wires here.As we said, they're going to be pretty easily labeled on the back of the trailer connector here. The yellow wire will go to the slot labeled LT, the green wire to the slot labeled RT, the white wire to the slot labeled GD and the Brown wire to the slot labeled TM. So now what we're going to do is we're going to take some RTV black gasket maker. We're going to go ahead and just fill in all these terminals. So we don't have to worry about water, getting in there and causing any corrosion. Now, granted the step isn't required, but it is going to be a good idea to help ensure you don't have any lighting issues down the road. Now we're going to slide our boot back on here. We can go ahead and secure the trailer connector to our mounting bracket.So now once we have everything installed, we have our trailer connector wired up. We're going to go ahead and test all these circuits to make sure they're working properly. We're going to be using a jump box. We have specifically for this purpose, but if you have your motor home nearby, that will probably be best for you guys. So we're going to turn on the tail lights, the left turn, brake lights, and we'll follow that up with the right turn. So there we go. Now we know everything's wired correctly and our lights are working. And that's going to do it for our look and installation of the Roadmaster Diode Wiring Kit, here for our 2020 Jeep Wrangler.