etrailer | A Closer Look at the Hopkins Wiring Harness with 5-Pole Flat Trailer Connector

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Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be checking out and showing you how to hook up the Hopkins five way trailer connector in. So what this five way is going to do is give you your basic functions. Right So you'll have your brake lights, your turn signals and your taillights but it's also gonna have another function. That's what this blue wire is here. That's gonna be for your reverse lights.

So there's a few instances on where this connector end would come in handy. If your trailer already has a setup like this and maybe the connector's beat up you can pick this up, you know, cut a portion of your existing wiring off and connect this into it. That way everything's new and fresh, or you can, I guess you could call it, upgrade from your traditional style four way flat connector here. And that's what we did here today. So on our boat trailer what we're doing is adding disc brakes and when you add disc brakes to a boat trailer or brakes for that matter, you're gonna have a surge type actuator here in the coupler.

And depending on what one you have some of these have an electric reverse lockout. And so what what will happen whenever the reverse light signal goes into here, it won't lock up the brakes and it'll let us allow us to back up. And so that's what we did. We got rid of our four way and hooked this one up, that way we can take our reverse signal that's gonna be coming from our towed vehicle or from our truck, It'll go into here and go into our reverse lockout solenoid whenever we're backing up or what some people do as well is, on my own smaller utility trailers and things like that, some people like to put reverse lights, you know, when they're backing up to the work site or whatever the case may be, and you could end up, you know, hooking up your reverse lights to this signal here and granted it's not gonna put out a ton of amperage but, you know, if you got a couple of led lights it's gonna be more than enough and that will work. So a few different applications for this, you know, I'm sure people use 'em for other things, too.

Those are just kind of things that come to my mind and something I wanna mention just since it's a five way, you can still use a, a four way flat, so let's say if your vehicle only has a four way or let's say if you get in a pinch, you need to borrow someone's car or something, you can still plug a four way into this. Right You just wont utilize that particular circuit. On a trailer like ours, probably not a good idea 'cause of this but if it's a utility trailer and it's, you're just using it for reverse lights, you know, it's not critical but just wanted to mention that, that way, you know, you kind of know what you need to do with your vehicle side. So I do wanna mention, you know, you're probably thinking what do I need to do on my vehicle side for this to work So let's just say, for example, if your tow vehicle only has a seven way round type trailer connector plug on on the back bumper or whatever, obviously this aint gonna plug right into it. So that's where something like this would come into play.

So this is essentially just an adapter and that end would plug into your vehicle seven way. And then it just turns into a five way flat connector. That way you can just plug that right in get everything that way. So pretty straight forward. Or let's say if your vehicle only has a four-way flat type connector on it, and you obviously want to use the reverse light function, there's vehicle ends as well. So you can actually convert your existing four-way flat connector on your car or your truck to one of these and be able to plug everything in and have all the functions actually work. The harness is going to be 18 inches long. So you're definitely gonna have some wires to work with in terms of that, depending on what you're doing you may need to extend some of 'em or kind of just depends on your existing trailer wiring, what's a, what's to work with there. And I do wanna mention, you know, it would be nice if they gave you a dust cover for this, obviously trailers sit outside a lot. It'd be nice to get this protected but if that's something you're interested in you can actually pick one up. It's pretty cool. It'll Mount to your trailer and then when you're done using it, you know, you can just plug it in there. So pretty cool actually, and to actually get this installed you know, it's gonna be similar for most people. We'll do it here in a moment and just kind of hopefully get you going