Thursday, December 01, 2022

Some Outside Home Wiring Repair

We had an "invisible" fence installed last winter for the dogs. Partially due to my surgery talking me off the dog walking roster. It works pretty well at keeping the dogs in the yard.

Unfortunately it was installed by an idiot.

The wires were buried after it thawed this year, but the burying was pretty crappy. The wires coming out of the garage where they were plugged in had been cut and connected with the standard orange non-waterproof connectors and not buried too deep with two of them not buried at all.  On top of that one of the wires had uninsulated wire poking out of the cap.

Either the dogs or other creatures dug near the wires, and the wires would then short out basically whenever it rained or snowed, which was not good. It would then set off a loud alarm in the garage that the loop was broken. Once it dried outside the alarm stopped and it worked again.

So, I decided to take a shot at fixing it.  I used waterproof connectors, covered then in electrical tape and then put silicon tape for more waterproofing on top of the electrical tape and wrapped it around tightly.

Two of the connectors live in a hole in the ground under a rock that keeps them sheltered from dogs or other predators that might like to rip them up.  The other two don't have a rock above them and are just standing up not buried in the dirt, so I need to figure out how best to rebury them.

So far all four repairs are holding up well, without shorting out even through a snowfall here and a major rainstorm since the repair was done.  I will  need to rebury them soon, unlike how the fellow left them, once I'm sure the fix is still holding up.

1 comment:

pigpen51 said...

A maintenance man at our shop was a former Navy comms guy. He had some connectors that had silicone seals inside, that when finished connecting the wires together, you squeezed them, and the silicone would mix within and a catalyst would cause the mix to set and seal the entire inside, waterproofing the whole thing.
It sounds much more complex than it is. But they worked even if sitting in a water tank, which we had a few places for cooling of hot steel bars.