etrailer | Hydrastar Electric Over Hydraulic Actuator for Disc Brakes Review

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-review-hy...
How we doing today, neighbors Ian with etrailer here, and I'm excited to bring you our Hydrastar trailer brake actuator. This one is meant for disc brakes, and we're gonna get into some features and then that install. This electric over hydraulic actuator is gonna be a great option for those who wanna stay away from surge brakes. So instead of having it push against anything that's going to cause the brakes to apply, this is gonna work with your brake controller and proportionally apply the brakes as much to the trailer as you press up in the tow vehicle. It's also gonna work with that manual override. So if you want use just your trailer brakes, and since you got those nice new disc brakes that this is gonna be powering, that's gonna be a wonderful addition to your camper.

Didn't want to touch base between the two actuator options we've got on our website at the moment. There's a 1,600 PSI, which we're running here for our disc brakes. There's also a 1,200 PSI option, which is gonna be for your drum options. This will run up to a triple axle. We're just running a tandem on this, which is completely fine as well.

But this will go all the way up to that triple axle, if need be. Now, the actuator is not gonna be the hardest part of the install in my opinion. You're still gonna have to put on the disc brakes to be able to convert those over for this to even work. And if you're running the 1,200, of course, that'd be the drum brake conversion if you're going that route. But with this, we are running the disc brakes and we're going to be tying into an existing seven-way.

The truck already has a brake controller. So these little things are gonna be things you need to be thinking about when you're hooking this up. You're gonna have to have that seven-way, you're gonna have to have the brake controller, and you're gonna have to switch over to disc brakes if you're moving to the 1,600 PSI version of this. But, we'll go through the whole install. I'll walk you through that process, and then you can check out the other videos if you wanted to see how to do the disc brakes, and the line run, and everything there.

We did do the line run kit for this and we'll walk through the whole process of getting this hooked up. And if it's not something after watching this, you feel like you want to try to tackle 'cause it is a very time-consuming process. And lucky for us here at the studio, we're able to take our time and really walk through it. But for DI wires, we'll go ahead and walk through it. For everybody else that doesn't feel like trying to do this yourself, check out Dealer Locator on our website. That's gonna get you a trained professional that'll get all that thrown in. But otherwise, let's get into the install. We will need to find a place for our actuator to live. We're gonna want something level because it does have to be level. We want it also somewhat secured from the elements. It can't be out in the open or stepped on, anything of the sort. So we've got this front compartment here where our batteries live. I'm gonna be mounting that right next to that battery box, just using some self-tappers here. And then it actually has the bracket already built into the actuator, so it's not something we need to worry about. But before we place it, you'll wanna get your line ran. Done, so everything going back to your brake system in the rear of the vehicle, just wanna make sure that we can get this fitting here. You'll just remove the red cap and that will thread in. And then the best thing to do is go ahead and get that tightened down with that 3/8 wrench. And I would suggest using a line wrench on those because it'll keep you from accidentally rounding out the edges of that fitting there, and snug that down until you feel good resistance. Now, as we go to bleed the actuator, you may find that you'd have a leak and that's no big deal. We can just tighten that back up. We're just gonna go pretty snug right now. (drill whirring) To go over how we've got the wiring set up for the actuator, our situation is gonna be a little bit different because we've got an additional breakaway battery box that we've got tied into the system. So that is gonna be kind of a little bit different than what your normal actuator's just gonna be hooked up to. So I'll break it down as far as how it should be hooked up. We're gonna start with the white wire, which we'v