Tekonsha Bench Tester

Video Transcript for Tekonsha Brake Controller 7585 Review

Speaker 1: Today we're going to take a look at the Tekonsha bench tester. This is going to be a handy tool if you need to isolate whether or not you're having a problem with your vehicle's brake control or with the wiring that hooks into that control. This is going to take our brake control separately from the wiring so you can determine which is going to have the problem. This is going to simulate a lot of different fault applications or fault conditions, and it's just going to help us determine if our brake control is working properly.This does plug into a normal 12-volt wall outlet, so we'll plug in our bench tester and demonstrate how that's going to work. You'll notice on the bottom we're going to have four wires to hook up to the wire pigtail coming off of the back of our brake control. We'll have the blue wire, which is going to be the output from our trailer or simulate our trailer's connection.

Our white, which is going to be our ground wire. Red, which will be the brake switch or it'll act as the connection to our brake pedal in the towing vehicle, and then black is going to be our 12-volt power.If we grab a brake controller just to demonstrate, we'll plug in our wiring pigtail at the back. Then we can connect all of those wires just color for color to that pigtail, so blue to blue, white to white. These just have a little alligator clip with that rubber cover going over it to make sure that we have a good connection. Of course, you want to make sure that the wires are stripped back.

These pigtails do come pre-stripped from Tekonsha typically, so you shouldn't have to worry about that, but if you do have to you can always just use some strippers. Strip about a quarter to a half inch back of that wire so you can get a good connection.Now with all those wires connected, we'll want to turn our bench tester on. You'll see the red light come on, indicating that we have power. You also should see the power come on our brake control as well. There's a couple different things that we can check out here.

We can make sure that the brake control registers an open ground. If we disconnect the ground wire there you can see the screen is going to register that we don't have a connection to our ground. That's working properly. Connect that back up. Should go back to our normal screen, as you can see there.If we disconnect the blue wire it should show that we've become unconnected from our trailer.

See it's flashing 'no connection'. As soon as we hook that back up it should indicate that we have that connected properly. Now, we can check the output of the brake control as well. You want to have the output set to between 10 and 11 volts. As you can see, as you push over on that manual override the voltage out meter is going to match that, so as we bring that over it's going to mimic that same amount of power.We can also taste the brake switch signal. This is going to simulate the brake pedal being pressed in your vehicle. If we hit that it should register. Then if you tip up on the brake controller that will mimic the accelerometer slowing down, so that's working properly as well. Now that we've identified that our brake control is working properly or as it should, we'll know that the issue lies with our vehicle's wiring. Now we can turn that power off and disconnect all of our clamps.Again, this bench tester's going to be a very handy tool to test your brake controller and make sure that everything's working properly. It can also help you to test other things like lights or small electronics where you just need to have that power and ground function. In the shop, we tend to use this especially for lights and things like that to demonstrate how they work, so it does some other multiple uses besides just testing a brake controller. This is going to be really handy for fleet use as well if you have a lot of different trucks or a lot of different brake controllers that you need to test out.As far as the dimensions for the box itself, I'll measure that up for you. On the box, it's going to be about 7 inches wide by 11 inches long, and 2 1/2 inches deep or 2 1/2 inches tall. The handle is going to come off the box about an inch and a half, so that'll increase that 7-inch width to more like 8 1/2 inches.That's going to do it for our look at the Tekonsha bench tester.