Brake controller wiring

[Dieselnerd]

I agree with you Rusty. After my recent disc brake install the installer made sure to point out not to remove the breakaway wire from the battery.

He said without the wire, the brakes wouldn't work.

 

[DGamelin]

RustyJC

That is wrong, the pump is supposed to to be wired straight to the 12v from the truck not to the brake away battery although the brake away battery is charged off the same lead from the truck. The wire from pump to the trailer plug should be a 10 or 12 gauge not the 14 or 16 gauge that is usually comes with the brake away battery kit. Do not rely on those generic batteries. I see at least a dozen of those batteries melted down a year with wires melted right off them. Then your brakes are gone. If you have a full size battery like in a RV or trailers with wenches it is ok to go from the truck to the battery then to the pump. With a full size battery there is no need for one of those little generic batteries.
The brake controller runs what I called a rheostat is more like a speed controller you would find on a remote control toy. The brake controller in the cab works like the trigger on the hand held remote control toy to run a speed controller inside the pump.

 

[DGamelin]

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[RustyJC]

RustyJC

That is wrong, the pump is supposed to to be wired straight to the 12v from the truck not to the brake away battery although the brake away battery is charged off the same lead from the truck. The wire from pump to the trailer plug should be a 10 or 12 gauge not the 14 or 16 gauge that is usually comes with the brake away battery kit. Do not rely on those generic batteries. I see at least a dozen of those batteries melted down a year with wires melted right off them. Then your brakes are gone. If you have a full size battery like in a RV or trailers with wenches it is ok to go from the truck to the battery then to the pump. With a full size battery there is no need for one of those little generic batteries.

Please look at my signature. My comments pertain to RV applications such as mine. I have a bank of 6V deep cycle batteries in the 5th wheel wired to produce 12VDC, and I can assure you that they power the hydraulic pumps for the Kodiak disc brakes, the automatic leveling system, the slideouts as well as other loads such as the residential refrigerator that's powered through a 1500 watt inverter. The truck's 12VDC system merely keeps the battery bank topped up during travel.

My comments are most certainly NOT wrong for my application.

Rusty

 

[Kirwin]

So for those of us learning about this.... besides the standard variable 12 volt power supplied on the blue wire, it looks to me like there is a separate 40 amp circuit (black wire in your diagram) that must be supplied to the hydraulic pump. This is powered from the RV's battery in a travel trailer/5th wheel set up and I'd agree that most small utility trailer batteries are probably not sufficient for this. However since the truck will not be connected during a break a way situation, I'd suspect that that battery SHOULD be large enough to activate the brakes and stop the trailer. It appears that the yellow wire supplies 12 volts to the hydraulic pump to cause activation of the brakes in a break away situation.

So is the question: that the blue wire "voltage" is not steady enough to properly activate the hydraulic pump?