Hopkins Replacement Break-Away Switch, 44" Lead Wires

Video Transcript for Hopkins Replacement Break-Away Switch Review

The Hopkins breakaway switch is a great replacement breakaway switch for your trailer. After a few years with the breakaway switch sitting out in the elements, depending on how it's stored, rust and corrosion can potentially occur fairly quickly if it is really exposed. And what will happen is if it is heavily corroded on the inside, when you pull the pin out, the contacts may not make good contact with another. They may not close all the way and touch and then it will not activate your brakes. So it is important that you test your breakaway switch before you go out. I usually just give it a pull and then just hop in the truck and throw it in gear without pressing the gas.

You should be able to usually roll a little bit forward or whatnot, maybe touch the gas a little bit if you're on some sort of an incline. And if it feels like your brakes are applied, then you know that you're good. You can insert your pin again and hit the road. But if you pull that pin, you hop in your truck, and it just pulls off, like you have no brakes, then you probably don't have a functioning breakaway switch or you could have an issue with your brakes. Obviously, if you got a brake controller, you can use that to verify if your brakes are working.

And if it works with the brake controller but not with the pin pulled, then you know that your switch here is no good and it needs to be replaced. Replacing your switch is easy, as it's only two wires, it just has a power wire and a brake output wire that goes to the electric brakes on your vehicle. And when the pin is pulled, it just jumps the contact between those two circuits together to send power directly from the battery back to the brakes. This switch comes in two different wiring length options. You can either get the 44 inch version, which is what we installed today, has 44-inch leads coming off the back, or you can get it in the 7 inch version which just has 7-inch wires coming out of the back.

So we'll begin our installation here by taking our switch. We've got two wires that we'll need to hook up and we'll need to mount it on the trailer with the tab there. To get this switch mounted up, we're gonna be using just a self-tapping screw. And then I did put a fender washer on it to increase the surface area, just to make sure that we've got good force on here. I also like that too 'cause it helps the switch, gives it kind of a chance to pivot a little bit better when it's in there.

So in case it's not perfectly straight, if you have a disconnect it can kind of pivot the switch to be straight with the vehicle and pull the pin out straight. So we're gonna mount it just on the bottom side of the trailer. We're gonna be putting it probably right here next to the switch box. That way it's close to the front. So that way our cable here will be long enough to be able to reach the vehicle and attach. So yeah, we're gonna put it in roughly that location there. And it's easier to just use the screw by itself to make the initial hole, and we can always zip it back out. So it is gonna take some pressure to get it to drill. There we go. And then we can just run it right back out, got our threads and everything made. We'll put our washer back on our bolt, line it up with our switch and then run it in there. That way you don't gotta hold a bunch of stuff together while you're trying to do this. And we've got our switch mounted and you can see it's got some pivot to it. So if it needs it, it can kind of transition to the best pull position for our vehicle there. So now we'll hook our wires up to our junction box here. I've already took the cover off the junction box. We have two wires here, a blue and a black. The black wire will go to power, so that way our switch has power going to it. And the blue wire will go to the electric brake, to the output that's gonna actually go to the brakes at the back. That way, if the pin gets pulled, it'll complete the circuit sending power from our battery down the black wire, through the switch, out the blue wire to our brakes at the back to activate 'em. So we're gonna push it through one of the grommets here on the side of our box. If you don't have a junction box and you don't wanna put one on, you'll just need to find your trailer brake wiring on your 7-way. It is typically the blue wire that's on your 7-way. And the black wire is typically the power from your 7-way. So for example, if you we're looking for trailer brake wires, you didn't have one of these boxes, here's our 7-way wiring. We hooked it into our box, but a lot of times that 7-way wiring, if you don't have a junction box, it'll just kind of go into the frame and my hole like this, or just run down the side of the frame back to your brakes and you can find the wiring there. So blue wires are gonna be brakes on ours. And again, that's usually the standard on most trailers is the blue wire. So we've got our blue here. This etrailer junction box simplifies things and gives you an easy way to hook a bunch of stuff up 'cause all of our 7-way wires have coloring on them and it matches up with the coloring on the end of the studs here. So it makes things just easy to make your connections. You can get this box here at etrailer and I do highly recommend it 'cause it protects all your connections from moisture and just really makes your trailer installation a lot neater and easier to work with, easier to add accessories and stuff like that in the future. So we're gonna take our wiring here. We're gonna trim it down. I usually recommend the 44 inch, people that have junction boxes just 'cause you don't know what kinda length you're gonna need to be able to go around, in, and then up. Sometimes it does exceed the 7 inch. If you're just hooking into like your 7-way here at the front and you're just gonna tap into it, then usually the 7-inch is good enough so you can mount the switch next to that. And then just reach right in here where you can splice into 'em. Both of these wires, we're gonna put ring terminals on. We've got our ring terminals connected. We just crimped it onto the wires. We can make our connections here on our breakaway, or in our box, or junction box here. So I'm just removing the nut for the blue stud here. And then oftentimes in these boxes you'll have a little washer on there. So just slide your little washer off. Then we'll hook up our circuits. Our blue is gonna go over here to this connection point. So we'll just slide that in place. We can then put our washer back on and then our nut. After we hooked up our blue wire we just hooked the black wire to the black post. Again, that's our battery positive. If you are doing this on your box, be careful when hooking it up to the black wire, because that is a live circuit that's hooked to the battery. One way you could make it safer is you could just disconnect the positive or negative side from your battery. I recommend usually the negative side, just disconnect the negative side of your battery. That'll remove power from your whole trailer once that negative side's disconnected and then this wire won't be live so you can make your connections without having to worry about any shorts. After we've got that connected up though, we're just gonna reinstall the cover on our box and then we'll test everything out. There's a couple of ways you can test it. We can verify the breakaway switch. You can do it right here on the junction box that you we're in, with your test light to see that it's getting output. And you can also verify that it's working by actually checking your brakes. That's the best way to do it. So you're verifying that your brakes are also working, but if you know your brake's working, you just need to check your switch, then you could do it with a test light. So we'll do it with a test light right here. And then we'll go back to the brake and show you that it works there as well. So I have a little breakout wire that I've got here to go inside the box to be able to check the brakes. So we're just gonna poke it in there and I'm gonna pull the pin and you can see that it's sending current back to my brakes right now. Put the pin back in and it stops. So what we're gonna do now is I've jacked up the trailer on the side. If I go back here and spin the wheel, you'll see that it's gonna rotate. I'm gonna pull the pin and it should have stopped the wheel from rotating. And then if I try to rotate it now, I'm unable to rotate it, the brakes are applied. When I put the pin back in, you should hear the brakes release. And we heard it release back there. We'll double-check to make sure that it did release and our brakes did release, so our breakaway switch is working properly. Our brakes are working. We're ready to get out and go on adventures again..