Tech Tips: Power-Termination of Self-Regulating Deicing Cable in a J-Box for Roof & Gutter or Pipe Freeze Protection

Hello, I'm Scott from WarmlyYours, and today we're going to talk about making a power connection for your self regulating gutter and snow melting cable, we have all the material here in front of us that we're going to be using for our power connection kit. Some of them are extra parts. You don't need them for this, but they will be in the bag. So what we'll do is we'll go step by step and show you how to make this connection at the beginning of your self regulating cable connection. The first step to get our connection done is to get the weatherproof seal parts put onto the cable. So you definitely want to put them on in this order. This will ensure that you have a waterproof seal. The next step is to get a ruler or tape measure and mark a spot seven inches down from the end of the cable. Once you mark the location of seven inches, you can then score the outer jacket, make sure that you do not cut any deeper than just the amount to get through the outer layer. Once you've scored the jacket at this point, you're going to go from this spot all the way to the end. This will allow you to remove the outer jacket. The next step is to take the middle braid and push it back towards your left hand to make it a little bit looser. The next step is to move the braid away as much as you can, because what we're going to do is we are going to loop the cable back through the hole that we're going to make in this braid. And the way to do that is you have to get it nice and loose to do that. So I'm just going to spread these out. So right now, I've worked the cable in through this hole that I created. You can see the braid is still staying intact, but you want to make sure you do this on a very tight radius. So it allows you to get this red cable to come out of the gap. I will continue to pull the cable out through the gap we made. At this point, we're going to the red inter jacket. We're going to measure six inches from there. And we're going to make a cut right here. What you want to do is make a cut that is just enough to allow you to get into the inner layer. I'm going to remove this layer just like we did the outer layer. So what we have here at this point is the matrix material, this is the material that makes a self-regulating cable do what

it does to make it heat up in certain areas and be cooler in other areas. This matrix is actually providing the resistance and it changes as the temperatures change. What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove. Now this matrix from the bare wires. There's two main bus wires located in here, and I'm going to remove all this matrix from that wire. Once we can see the metal braid from the outside, that is enough that it will allow us to pull the matrix material away from the bus wire on this side. Now we need to do the exact same thing for the other bus wire, which is on this side of the cable. The next step is now that I have the bus wires removed from the matrix, I need to get rid of the matrix right here because we're going to make these into separate wires. So I'm just going to cut this. Now we can see the matrix has been removed from the bus wires, but we need to make sure the bus wires don't touch each other and create a short. So I'm going to get rid of this matrix material. And now we have to insulate these individual bus wires. All right. The next thing we need to do is we need to find the two long heat shrink tubes in place, 1 over each bus wire all the way down until it makes contact with the matrix on both sides. Now, at this point, we have the heat shrink tubes on. And you can see that it leaves enough on each end to make a good connection. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to use a heat gun to get these shrunk up on here. With heat shrink tubing, it's always very important to get it from more than one direction. Because if you shoot it from just one side, it's only going to constrict on the one side. So you need to make sure that you can get it from both sides, top and bottom. 

 After you get your two black heat shrink tubes put on, the next thing to do is to get the green and yellow heat shrink tube over the ground. This insulation will keep the ground shield from coming in contact with the voltage carrying bus wires, now that we have the heat shrink tubing on the ground, we can go ahead and use our hot air gun. To make the heat shrink nice and tight over the ground wire. Now that we have our ground heat shrink on and the heat shrink on our bus wires, we need to take the inch piece of heat, shrink tubing and place it over the bus wires like this. And center it. So we have the middle of the tube resting right where my fingers pointing here, so we want part of it to be over the red and part of it to be over the black. So we need to make sure that it overlaps. So we're going to go ahead and do that. And get out your hot air gun. They want to do this until the clear adhesive flows out onto the red wire. We can see that's happening now. Now we go ahead and concentrate our hot air between the two bus wires, because what we're going to do is we're going to get this nice and hot and then we're going to take a pair of needle nose pliers. And while it is nice and hot, I can see it's nice and hot because we're getting the adhesive flowing out this way is while it's hot, we take our needle nose pliers and we stick them right down in between the bus wires and we pull that closed. Making a good seal. And you can see now we have the glue coming out, which means we have a waterproof seal. All right, now that we have our heat shrink on our bus wires have been treated and now they're ready to be hooked up to power, our ground lead is now insulated from making contact with the bus wires because you can see we have heat shrink on our ground. Also, it's now time to get our weatherproof fittings in place to get them ready to put into our waterproof box. Once we have the hardware in place, we can get the wires into our waterproof box. 

OK, now it's time to get our power supply wire, which is usually Romex , and we need to get that rooted into our box also, now that we have all the wires in the box. Now it's time to start pairing them up. So we're going to go ahead and just attach this one from the self regulating cable. And we're going to use our included wire nuts. And we'll go ahead and tie those together, you'll want to check your local code to see if you're allowed to put electrical tape around this connection. If you're allowed to do that, it now would be a good time to do that. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to get our other bus wire made it up to this wire of Romix. Make a nice, firm connection and the last connection is going to be our ground connection. Now that we have our connections here, let's go ahead and make our waterproof connection at this side. And once we get our waterproof seal here, we can go ahead and place this into the box. So now that we have our connections made. Now we just put our waterproof cover over the front of our waterproof box. And then we go ahead and put the screws in and put a little sealant on there to make this completely waterproof. If you notice the Romex side, we'll have to be done either with through conduit or with another waterproof connector. However, your electrician is going to do that, but that is how you make your connection from your power supply to your power connection kit that you just made. And that's how you get power to your roof and gutter deicing, self-regulating cable.

If you have any other questions. Our instructions are online or you can give us a call at 800 875 5285 or check us out at www.WarmlyYours.com Thanks for watching.