How to splice repair a TempZone™ heating cable using butt connectors

OK, what we're going to do today is we're going to do a twin conductor Tempzone repair using these parts that come in the repair kit. We have a 6 inch piece of 3/8 inch adhesive lined heat shrink tube, which can be located or purchased anywhere. What you want to do is make sure that you get adhesive lined or dual wall, whatever they want to call it. In that particular case, you can get these of Fastenal and the Fastenal part number is on our instruction sheet. That will come with the kit. Also with the kit, you'll get 2 insulated, butt connectors that are also heat shrink that also have a solder in the middle that we're going to melt using a heat gun. And we have an uninsulated but connector, it's to connect the grounds together once we get our repair done. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a look at these wires. And you can see on the instruction sheet when you get it, that the wires have been cut about an inch back from where the bad spot is. You go about an inch back. And then you cut one connector, one wire shorter than the other. That helps offset these two. When they're right next to each other, these will shrink up. So they will become smaller. So you kind of want them offset. You don't want the thickest parts to rest against each other. You kind of want them to rest like that. So they fit in a little bit better. And that's why they're cut as so. And you can see this on the instructions. So once we get an inch back, we get our ground tied together. And then we make offsetting cuts. We we can go ahead and start doing the repair. The thing is, when you're cutting these offsets, you want to make sure that you do the exact same. So they match up perfectly. So use some sort of gauge that you can go a quarter inch, whatever you decide to do. I use a cutter so I can make the same distance cut on each one. So before we start to put these on and these on, we need to get the adhesive lined heat shrink tube on the wire in advance, because you can't put it on afterwards, so we're going to take that and put it over our spot here. And then we're going to get our wires lined up. We're going to take this and get it out of the way of the uninsulated. Butt connecter is going to be done last. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this. And I am going to put that on there about you can feel it mechanically. Stop it. Only go so far. And once you do that, you then make your connection and crimp it down, and that will hold it in place. It's very important when you use these wire strippers, they come with a connecter crimp at the end. And you will see that the red matches the pink. If this were 16 to 14 gauge, it would be blue. But these connectors are pink. So that tells us. We're going to use this outside spot to make our crimp. 

So what we do is we get our thing on here real well. Get it out of the way. Making sure that the wire stays in while we crimp it down really, really well, and then once we make our crimp, we pull on it to make sure it's tight and that one is tight. So the next one we're going to do is we're going to, that was our short side. Now we'll go ahead and put this side in. And once we do that. We should see if our other side will line up, and it will and see the wires of the right length. We take our crimper again. And squeeze very tightly. And pull, if you can pull on it, and it doesn't go anywhere, that tells you your connection is really good. So what we're going to do in a very near future is we're going to get that sealed up. So it was going to give us some room to work on our next connection. And if you take a quick look here, you can see where our soldor has melted in the center. And we can see our wire very well through the pink connector. If you can see it really well, that means it's completely, It's gluing itself onto the wire. So we can get a good idea whether our connection is going to be good. So we have a nice, clear wire that we can see eventually, as it cools off, it's going to turn opaque, but we can see that the solder has flowed together. So now, not only do we have a mechanical bond between the two wires, we also have a solder heated bond between those wires and the solder. So that connection is not going to come apart. So we're going to let that connection cool off a little bit. And once it cools off, you'll see that it turns opaque. When you're doing this, try to keep it straight. So it doesn't bend that way, you make sure you have a nice, good connection. So we're just going to let it cool off. And as it cools off, you can see the wire will disappear inside there. We won't be able to see it anymore. And that just means that it's cooling off and it's gluing itself to the wire. I can see that this is hardened up, so it's a little more stiff, so it's going to be a little more resilient to us while we make our next repair. Now it's time to take our second. Butt connecter. When we do the same thing with our crimping tool. We make our connection, we want to make sure it's tight. And we make our next mechanical connection. Then we pull on that connection. And it's nice and tight. So that tells us our connection here is going to be good. And now we're going to add the heat shrink and the melt the solder inside there to make it even better. It's very important to get around the entire heat shrink, because if you only shoot it from one side, it will not contract all the way around. So we're going to make sure that we do that all the way around, then we're going to, now that we have our seal, we're going to melt the solder. And you can see the soldor flowing inside, we can go ahead and get our grounds connected, and to do that, we use our arm in uninsulated. Butt connecter. So the reason this is. So we can use an uninsulated but connector is because the voltage carrying wires are isolated from the ground now, there's no way they can touch. So we don't have to worry about doing this insulated. You could use a drop of solder to hold this together. If you wanted to. Or you can just use this. Butt connector. And that's what we're going to do. So there is our ground connection on this end. Make sure you don't have any stray ground sticking out. Our ground connection is nice and tight. Now it's time for us to get our final layer of heat shrink tubing onto the wire. Now, if you look here, we can see that we send you six inches of this tubing. You're not going to need 6 inches to do this repair. So if you have to trim it down a little bit, you're more than welcome to do that. But you want to just make sure that you get the wire covered. So we know our repair is right here, so we go ahead and see how that looks on the tube means we can smooth this over a little bit. That looks about right. Remember to get all the sides, to get it all to shrink, uniformly. Now, when you do this, it's a good idea to get it really tight all the way from here to here to make sure it's nice and constricted because there's glue inside this tubing. And the more glue you have adhering to the wire, the more chance it has of being waterproof. So you make your connection here. And then you go ahead and get your waterproof seal done inside here. If you don't get it done exactly right, you can put a little RTV sealant or some liquid tape or something like that to fill the gap if you don't get a nice, tight seal there. So there we can see what our repair looks like. And we're all done.