I bought a Hopkins brake force brake controller for use on my truck. I installed it, and it failed . . . so obviously I'm doing something wrong. I ran the power wire from the positive lug of the ignition coil, just like the backlight on my tachometer. My tachometer light turns on when I turn the key to run, and turns off when I turn the key to off or ACC.

I wired the brake controller along with the tach as much as I can. Ground wire going to negative battery terminal along with tach ground. Power for tach, tach light, and brake controller going to ignition coil positive terminal. Blue wire going to trailer plug. Red wire going to brake light switch. All sources say you need to tap the white wire with brown stripe coming from the switch, so thats what I did. When I first tried starting up after install, it burnt the power wire to coil. So I replaced that and it burnt the ground wire. Replaced that and the brake controller caught on fire

So what is going on here? Is it possible I'm somehow getting fire from the coil into the brake controller? When the controller fried, my tach acted all crazy, and after that, it was fine, and with no changes from me, the smoke was gone. The light on the tach is fine. Why not the brake controller?

 

what gauge wiring are you using? you wired it to the coil? i don't know what the instructions said but i think you probably need to use something like a 12gauge. i think you also need to wire the positive wire to the battery with a self resetting circuit breaker or something like that. i know the trailer brake system that was on my 91 was wired straight to the battery with a circuit breaker.

 

It was some thin gauge wire that was originally powering the light in the tach. I replaced it with 12 or 14 gauge when it burnt. Yes. I had the positive connected to the positive lug on the ignition coil.

The parts store said they would accept a return under warranty (thank you!), and next time, I'm just going to wire it in perfectly by the book, right to the battery, with an inline fuse. My thinking was that if it drew power only when the coil had power that it wouldn't drain my battery when it was sitting. I guess that was a flop.

 

i don't think you want to use a fuse. you want to use a circuit breaker so that it can reset itself and brakes continue to work were as a fuse has to be replaced but you have to figure out how to stop the load first.
http://www.princessauto.com/pal/prod...ircuit-Breaker

 

this is shows you exactly what you have to do
http://www.etrailer.com/faq-brakecontroller.aspx

 

Thank you. I'll try it again I guess.

 

Update: I installed the brake controller exactly as in the diagram, with a 30 amp breaker, and all is well. Thanks wolfie! I think I would have just used a fuse unless you told me about the breaker.

Its interesting how well brakes designed for a 7000# trailer work when the trailer's empty weight is less than 1000#. I had to turn the power down to 30% to avoid dangerous lockup.

 

at one point in time i would not even have known about the breakers but i have spent enough time on here to to learn a fair bit about them.