etrailer | What to Know About the Demco Hydraulic Brake Actuator w/ Electric Lockout

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Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Demco Hydraulic Disc Brake Actuator with the reverse electric lockout. But before we get to that, why don't we just take a minute, check this out and make sure it'll work for you. So this is gonna be a good upgrade or replacement for a lot of people. And what this is gonna allow you to do is operate the disc brakes on your trailer. So whether you already have a setup like that and maybe this got damaged or something and you need a new one, this'll work out for you.
Or in many cases like ours today, we're actually adding this brakes to our trailer. And so obviously we need a way to operate those. And that's where this is gonna come into play. This will fill up with a brake fluid and being that it is a surge brake type actuator. What happens whenever your towing your trailer, in our case, it's a boat, pretty popular setup for boats, but whenever you hit the brakes, the weight of the trailer is gonna wanna shift forward.
And when that happens, it's going to activate a cylinder in here essentially, and send fluid back to the brakes, to the disc brakes on the trailer. And that's how it's gonna slow everything down. Now with that said, this particular one is only designed for trailers with this brake, so keep that in mind. A lot of times the disc brakes require a little bit higher pressures and say your drum brake. And so that's what this one is gonna give us, that way everything works properly.
This particular setup is also gonna have what's called an electric reverse lockout. And so what that means, whenever you put your tow vehicle in reverse, the brakes on your trailer are not gonna be applied. Because without that feature, I guess you could say, whenever you try to back up, the brakes are gonna be applied and that's not something you always want. Especially the boat, you're getting ready to launch it or back down the ramp. There's ones that have that feature.
They're just not electric. So you'd have to get out here and usually put a pin in or something along those lines. Kind of a pain. A lot of times you'll end up forgetting to do that and then cause some issues there. This one, though, you wire it up in a way that soon as you put your truck in reverse, that's it. You don't have to worry about anything. You know it's not going to activate your brakes. In order to accomplish that though and for it to work, your trailer is gonna have to have a five-way flat wire. So essentially this is just a standard four-way with your standard signals, your tail lights, brake lights, turn signals, but you get this additional one, this blue wire here and that's for the reverse light. So if your truck has a seven-way, you plug the seven-way in. And there's an a seven-way adapter, you plug it in, and then it turns it into this. You can plug that right in and that's how you're gonna get the reverse light signal back here. This unit is gonna work with trailers that have a straight tongue that is three inches wide. And so essentially, you'll cut off the old stuff you got or unbolt it, whatever. And then this will drop on and bolt into place. You will have to get in your own nuts and bolts to secure everything, but not a huge deal. And it is going to have a two inch coupler. So whenever you put this onto your ball mount, you wanna make sure that your ball is a two-inch ball. So pretty standard stuff there. I am a fan of these couplers. They offer these couplers just plain on setups like this. They're easy latch and they're pretty cool actually. So you don't even have to mess with this when you go to hook up to your ball or to your towed vehicle, you just back up and lower this right down on and it clicks it into place automatically. Granted, whenever you're ready to unhook, you will have to open up the latch, but it's pretty convenient there. The latch mechanism, one thing that I wasn't too crazy about at first is this is actually plastic. And I'm thinking, that's gonna break over time. There's no doubt about it and everything else. But we actually had, Dave here in the shop, quite some time ago beat on this with a hammer. And these are no joke. It did not break. And I mean, he whacked it quite a few times, really hard and it left a couple little nicks in there, but it never broke. So I was proven wrong. I'm actually pretty impressed with the coupler mechanism. The weight ratings for this is gonna be 7,000 pounds for your maximum gross trailer weight rating. So obviously how much everything weig