etrailer | Hopkins Trailer Breakaway Kit Review

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Hi, John with etrailer. Hey, folks, if you have a trailer and it's rated at 3000 pounds or more gross trailer weight rating, you need this. This is the trailer breakaway system. Now, whether or not you need a replacement or if you have a trailer and doesn't have one on it, this is a great option for you. This is Hopkins Breakaway System. And one of the things I like about this system is the battery is contained in the unit.
It has LED up here, so if you want to test to see if the battery inside is charged, that's great. Also, it can plug in into your towing vehicle, which can be going down the road and charging the internal battery as well, lets you know that. It also lets you know when you need to recharge. Now the other main component in this kit is the breakaway switch that mounts to your trailer and it has a long cable lead and this is going to attach to the towing vehicle. In the event of an emergency this pin will be pulled on the switch.
Your brakes will automatically apply regardless if you come detached from your truck electrically or not. That's the reason it has an onboard battery. So some things to keep in mind like dimensions and where you're gonna put it on your trailer. As far as dimensions go, from this tab here over is four inches. We've got 8 inches long, 6.25 inches deep.
As far as installation goes, if you have some space up here on your trailer or somewhere it's gonna mount in pretty much a small footprint, so that's not too bad at all. And it'll tie in to your existing junction box. If you we're like us and you take the lid off and it's just a tangled rusty mess on the inside of that junction box, go ahead and pick one up here at etrailer and it'll make your life a lot easier when you go on to rewire this. But anyway, if you wanna see how we install this and how it installs on our trailer, stick around. And before we get started with the installation, let's take a close look and see what you get in the kit and basically how it functions.
So you've got your breakaway box here. This is gonna be all of the controls in here. What I like about it, got a test button up here and a green LED light up showing you that the battery on the inside of this is charged or if it needs recharged or when it's hooked up to your vehicle shows that it's charging. On the inside we got just a small lead acid battery in here. It's sealed up. This is meant to be mounted on your frame with this section up. It does have a couple of holes here if we wanna put a lock padlock or something like that, keep that safe for you. Also, you're gonna get the breakaway switch. This is gonna tie in with this system and in the event of a catastrophic problem with one of the components that you're towing with and this pin pulls this and this is gonna automatically apply the electric brakes on your trailer. Let's get this installed. As far as mounting options on your trailer, like I said, it's gonna depend on your trailer. We have a bunch of different accessories on this one and our junction box is actually over on this side. So for us the best course of action is probably gonna be about right here. We can still flip the lid if we need to. And the wires can go right in to the other side. Or we could even run them underneath like that to the junction box. So kind of like that. Again, it doesn't have to be mounted with this side going forward. If you had a different setup or something like that we could go this way as well. We're gonna use some self-tapping screws to mount this. They're not included in the kit. Sometimes on these frames it's pretty tough to get these self tappers to go in. So I grabbed a 5/32 drill bit instead, drilled it first, and I'm gonna run the self tapper in and out to kind of thread it. That'll be a little bit easier. And we can mount this one side up. We'll mark out on the other side where we need to mount it and just repeat the process until we get all the bolts in here. Now we can mount up the breakaway switch much the same way. When you're mounting this up you want this pretty close to the front, not actually on the tongue hitch itself, but pretty close to the front. You're gonna have a section of cable here that you run up to the tow vehicle. You just wanna make sure you have enough length. This one we're actually replacing an older braking system on this. We already had the preexisting hole here and the old breakaway switch was over here. So we're gonna mount this in th