How to Seal an End Cap on a TempZone™ Electric Floor Heating Cable

Hello, today, we're going to talk about replacing the end cap on the end of a twin heating cable inside the heating cable, there actually two wires that heat up. And at the end inside of this is where they are joined together. So what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to replace this cap in case, it gets damaged during installation to replace the end cap. You'll just need some simple tools to do that. You'll need a pair of needle nose pliers. You'll need a crimper that we're going to use to crimp on our connectors. And what you'll need is a blade to trim back the covering. So you can get at the wire. One thing that you will need to get from us or get it locally is a splice kit. We'll be using part of the splice kit here to replace the parts inside of the end cap. The first step to replacing end cap is to cut it off. That's where the needle nose pliers come in because they're really good at cutting the wire off. Now, what we'll do is we'll take out the butt connector that's insulated here. And as you can see, it's got to shrink wrap around it. An interesting thing featuring tubing. And in the center of it, you will see that there is a little solder bead inside there. What that's going to do is that's going to help us make a really good connection by melting it into the wire. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get an idea of where the wire rests inside. And it goes about halfway to that solder bead. And that's about where I want to trim the outer jacket back on the heating wire. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just slightly press down on the blade and we're just cutting through the outside layer of the blue cover that's going to allow us to get at the heating wires that are inside. They're wrapped individually. So we need to get at them, but we don't want to be cutting through them. You can now cut down the wire. Now we can see with the outer jacket removed, we have a copper layer inside. And this copper wire is actually wrapped around the two heating wires or the two heating elements or the twin conductors, as they're called, inside of the wire. So we're going to separate these wires from each other. And we're going to get the ground twisted as so, now we'll need to strip the inner conductors back, but we're going to use this as an idea of where two of our cuts are going to take place because we want the wires to be insulated from the ground. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get an idea of where this insulator is going to cover. And then I'm going to move over about 1/16 of an inch,because at that, when I do that, I'll have a good overlap and it will be insulated from the ground. Now that we have an idea of where our wires are going to be located inside the insulated butt connector, we want to make sure that we don't strip too much insulation away because we want this part here to be stripped and free of any insulation that's on it, because we want it to fit in this lower area here, because that's where we're going to actually use the creepers to attach the wire onto the butt connector. So we're going to trim the insulation back to about right here on each one. Now, when I am removing the insulation from the small conductor wires, notice that I'm not using a wire strip wire stripper. The reason is the different sizes of rolls or mats that you are working on will have different thicknesses of wire, and they're not standard if you look on a common wire stripper. There are certain standard sizes that are on there. This is not standard size, so you can't use a stripper on it. Now that I've got the insulation stripped back from both wires, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put on our black heat, shrink this adhesive line, I'm going to put it on the cable at this point, because what it's going to do is it's going to be wire waterproof connection at the end. So I'm going to get it on to the wire. And out of the way. Now that we have our black heat shrink tubing on the cable itself, I'm going to take the two wires that are exposed. I'm going to twist them together. And I'm going to put our insulated butt connector over the wires. Now that we've got the butt connector on the wire, we're going to take our wire strippers and we're going to match this part of the wire stripper up to the butt connector. This butt connector is read. Some of them are blue, some of them are yellow. But what we're going to do is since this is red, we're going to use the red slot on the wire stripper to compress the insulated, but connector onto the wires to hold it in place. All right, so we've identified the red slot on the wire stripper, I'm going to take that slot and put it onto the butt connector. In this area where the two uninsulated portions of the wire are, and I'm going to compress it as hard as I can, sometimes it's good to use a table or floor to press against. Now, what I do is I pull on it to make sure that the wires are seeded very well inside there and they don't pull loose and this one's looking good, the next step is to heat it. So it seals up. All right. 

 So now that we have the insulated butt connector attached to the two wires, I'm going to heat this area up first, because what I want to do is when I heat it, I'm going to take our needle nose pliers and I'm going to close it off to seal the end. Now we can see that there is a clear liquid coming out of the end of the butt connector, that is the glue, so that means this is a watertight seal. The next thing we have to do is we have to get our watertight seal done on this side. Now that we have our end seal done on the. But connecter, I'm going to move to this side of the buck connector and get this area to close up, because I want to get this closed up before I melt the solder. If I don't close this end up and I melt the solder, there's a chance for the solder to run out and run up against the ground, which would make me have to do this connection over again. So here we go. Always heat all the way around to make sure that it constricts from all directions. If you do it from one side, only one side is going to melt and make a good connection. You can tell when it's starting to get good, because you can see that it gets clear and it's easy to see the wires inside. We're just going to keep this up until that clear liquid comes out the end, meaning that we have a watertight seal. Now that we've got the end sealed, we can go ahead and melt the center of the section. And now we can see that our solder pellet has melted and our solder now is inside the sealed Butt connector. Now that we have our bud connector completely sealed at both ends. It's time for us to get the ground back into position. And this ground is just going to go next to the butt connector. The butt connector is insulating the ground from the center heating core wires. So now that we've got the ground placed back here where it needs to go, we take our black heat shrink tubing. We get it over the connection and what we want to do is we want to get it centered. So we know where the end is of the old connection on the butt connector. And it's right there because we want to have enough that we can heat it up and squeeze it with our needle nose pliers. We also want to make sure that there is enough to make a good seal at this end, and there is to make a good watertight seal here. So now that we've got it centered, and we're convinced that we can make our seal at both ends, we can go ahead and heat up. The black shrink starting at this end. Once I get this nice and hot. I got our water tight seal at the end. And our waterproof connection at this end. Now, we can see after the heat shrink has actually shrunk, we can see our water tight seal at this end. And if we look down here, we can see that there is our clear liquid coming out from this end, meaning this end is completely waterproof because the inner adhesive has flowed out of the connection. So this wire, this cap are now glued together and the extra glue that's come out at the end has made it waterproof. So now we can see how easy it is to replace the end cap if it should get damaged during installation. If you have any other further questions, we can send you instructions that show you exactly how to do this. And we can help you through, on the phone 24/7, 365 days a year.

If you need some help doing this. So now you know how to do an end connection on a twin heating cable. Thank you so much for watching.