so we know that we use wire nuts to connect small
wires together but what do we do when we have really large wires
all right so for really large wires we have to use something called a Polaris tap so uh when
we're dealing with larger conductors we have to have something that we can just put one conductor
in put another conductor in squeeze them together and it needs to be able to fit the number of wires
that we're trying to deal with so a lot of times out at Services we'll have a large parallel feed
come in so we'll run like two blacks Two Reds two whites so once we get into the service to get all
of those conductors together we have something to tie them all in together so we use these blocks
now there's a whole bunch of different ones they're all called Polaris Taps because the
company is called Polaris so most of us just call them Polaris Taps you might hear people call them
like ipls or iplds or something like that and that just means like the design of how the wires come
in or come out essentially we'll get into that in a second all right let's start out with this
guy this is essentially a way for you to get a long Polaris tap that might be long and skinny
into a much more shorter squattier version so on this you've got six terminals where you can put
you know three and one side three in the other on this one you have six terminals sometimes we
run into a situation where we've got a shallow Gutter and you need to put six wires together
but you can't fit this into the terminal so what do you do well they came out with this option so
it makes it so that it is half the size but it still has six places to put wires now you
might look at this and be like well there's nine holes in it right well you're meant to put three
in the top and then three in the bottom the the reason that they do this is they they allow you
to do what's called a pass through you don't have to use these for past three but every once in a
while we will want to take a conductor and we'll like score it in the middle and we'll just strip
that insulation out and you can stick this whole thing through the Polaris tap and then bite down
on it rather than having to like cut it or having two ends to work with the one thing
that you need to be careful though when you're doing pass-through conductors a lot of people
tend to like over strip and so they've got copper showing on like the outsides of of the terminal if
you have any copper showing on the outsides you have a potential to Arc between the metal and
the copper wire so be really careful if you're ever doing that like try to undercut whatever
you're taking off in insulation but essentially the reason that these have come out is because
they're taking really long skinny things that you can't fit into a gutter and giving you the same
amount of terminals in something that's a little bit squattier that can fit inside of most gutters
so this is just one style right this is this is huge so the conductors you're talking about
500 MCM to 4 AWG that's what this is listed for so just because you're buying 500 doesn't mean
you have to have 500 right there's you could use larger ones but Polaris Taps are not as cheap as
wire nuts are so as you will see when you go to buy them they're pretty costly so the the
methodology behind it is to make sure that you get the right ones for the right size for the
right application otherwise you're going to be spending a whole bunch of money for no reason
so now there are different configurations so you know this is the same exact thing looks identical
it's just less conductors so you might only have three conductors that you're working with that are
you know Dead ending and three that are passing through or you might only have one that's passing
through but you have like five other ones that you need to put on there you get like a whole bunch of
blacks going into multiple different disconnects for like an apartment building or for like a uh an
office you know that's got like five different Suites so each one of them is feeding off the
same set of service entrance conductors that's a possibility so essentially all of these are the
same thing it's just that it shows that there's different configurations for numbers of conductors
so we would have three incoming conductors this one we have five incoming conductors this one we
have six a lot of times when you hear electricians talk about Polaris Taps we say Barrel so this is a
three Barrel this is a five Barrel this is a six barrel but um that's for one application of these
so this would probably typically go up into a gutter above a service or something like that but
these are all dry location actually everything on here up till here is all only allowed to be
used in dry locations not damp or wet locations so if you're doing a direct burial application or
you've got like a a direct burial junction box in the ground well all that Earth is damp and
wet and it rains constantly so you shouldn't be using any of the any of these in a location where
there's moisture or dampness moving on from that though the next one is you'll see these from time
to time and this is where you have the ability to bolt them to something so right like we stick
a bunch of conductors in here this thing is just floating like this there's no way to secure this
to anything and we don't always need that most of the time we don't need it but it does come in
handy when you're dealing with a lot of different conductors coming in from different directions if
we have a means to actually bolt it to something so with both of these Styles this is the IPL M so
if we wanted to like get these neatly stacked next to each other or we want it to like make like a a
pretty kind of display of it so once you open up a box these things don't just come flying at you but
also it's a way for you to be able to do cleaner work so it's got a really great purpose but
essentially you know you have four conductors that come in four conductors that go out and you've got
two holes that you can mount and take a screw and just screw this to whatever enclosure you
want to so the mountable style is really cool I like them because it can kind of get messy
especially when you have like smaller ones with big wire the wire doesn't want to just sit back
where you tell it to it's always going to like try to like fold out so you gotta end up putting
zip ties in and putting straps in and trying to just get everything secured back so I love these
mountable ones because it I can make a gutter look phenomenal with stuff that can actually be
secured to the enclosure all right so in this test environment obviously there's no ground nothing's
phased you got wires hanging out here this isn't a job site I'm just setting this up for like testing
the laboratory purposes and you're not going to have a cut off wire on the inside but bear with
me so the reason that I really like these mount on or mountable Polaris Taps is because they're
stuck on they're like out of the way I could have run some conductors up top for this one I could
Mount another one next to it run the conductors in the middle on that one run another one in the
back and put lower conductors and it just keeps everything nice and clean that's why I really
like these mountable but not I mean most supply houses are going to have your standard D IPL D
version of this where you've got a couple spaces for conductors to come in couple for them to go
out reason again that I don't like using them as much is because you just have all this free
stuff in there and once you start getting like Five Barrels six barrel Polaris Taps and you're
talking like I don't know 600 copper or something like that you're talking about wires you can't
really maneuver or manipulate that much but one thing I always try to do is just make sure that
my conductors are always in there straight there's other things that you can do inside here using zip
ties and strapping other things little pieces of metal and things in the back of this little
bracketing things that you can come up with to try to keep everything neat otherwise it just becomes
this crazy jumbled mess and nobody wants to deal with it all right the next series that we're going
to talk about are this whole kind of tea style a lot of people will call these iplds but they're
not necessarily iplds like you have to look at the part numbers for all of these so while this
um this one that has four termination points on it actually says ipld on the back of it whereas
the one with the same exact size that's only two says it's it so this is an it250 this is an ipld
250-4 because there's B4 of them so the reason that this uh sort of T style is so widely used
is it's really versatile so not only do you have this whole like kind of L shape where you've got
two things coming in from one side that you could use this as because it's got the caps on the back
but you can remove the caps and change it around so you can have one conductor coming in from one
way and one going out the other way so it also kind of uh Works to be like a butt splice sort of
a thing where you can go end to end with things so they're really really versatile and you know
they make them in every size you can imagine you can get like uh eight I don't even know what the
largest size is but I've seen you know like huge blocks um where you put multiple connectors in
them so uh you're gonna probably find this style more often in like Lowe's Home Depot your local
supply houses it seems just because of the versatility that more of our supply houses
tend to hold this whole tea style more often so you'll probably end up using them more and then
stuff like this that's kind of special use a lot of times you're gonna have to order them
so Polaris actually makes a see-through option one thing to note about these clear connectors is
the benefit is you can actually see the conductor seated inside of there you can see if you know if
you cut it too short it'll just allows you to make sure that you've got a fully seated termination
there's a little window on the back side and on the front side you can kind of see into it so
sometimes there's an issue with people like not stripping it out enough and then when they go to
um oh this one's stripped way too much but if they were like they were like that short right
and they went to put it in there sometimes the terminal can actually tighten down on the
insulation it doesn't actually make contact with conductor so you won't have power to something
you're wondering why so with the clear the actual benefit is that you can see through it that's why
I like using the clears when they're available one thing to note is you'll notice that there's
two different styles of terminating if we look in this one we've got threads down in there so the
threads are meant to crush down and like squeeze on The Wire really firmly but with this version
specifically you'll notice that there's a there's a little bit of an insert this kind of like weird
flange little insert that goes on the inside in there one on each side this is specifically for
finely stranded conductors so once you get like really finely stranded conductors a lot of those
conductors won't get pinched down in a termination won't be as good of a termination with something
that is threaded so they use something like this so it kind of evenly crushes down on the entire
thing you just get a tighter connection with that now you'll notice that some of these have a gray
cap some have black caps black is for standard wiring the gray is more specifically for copper
and finely stranded flexible copper conductors you might see some other brands that might have
different caps on them as well usually to notes like for motor circuit conductors and things like
that but specifically with Polaris the gray just means stick with copper and more specifically it's
for finely stranded copper and most of the time it's going to be for DC or motor applications all
right then the next style that we've got is a kind of sort of like a butt splice right you put two
conductors end to end rather than two conductors side by side sometimes you have a cut you need to
make a splice and fix a broken wire other times you're running stuff in conduit and you're just
trying to join the wires together at one end or you're trying to tap and spider out into
my multiple other places now just so you're aware this is still a dry location braided connector so
this is not something that if you find a wire in the ground and it's cut you go get one of these
and stick this on there and just bury it in the ground it has to be something that's submersible
rated or direct burial you know damp wet location rated so you could use something like this
it says direct Berry and submersible sealed wire connector system for use in wet or damp locations
so you can see these things you have these little plugs in there and you cut the ends of these off
depending on the size of the conductor that you're feeding in and then you feed the conductor through
the end of this and insert this cap so it makes sure that it's still sealed and then it's got
some heavy Dielectric grease that you apply to the conductor insulation when you slide it in
there as well now submersible does not mean that it is fully submersible for long-term periods of
time the listing that they have is for temporary submersion so it's really more talking about water
getting into an enclosure and then draining out and drying later these aren't for something that
you would use like to stick down in a well or something like that so that you could keep a
termination down there it seals it but it's not meant for long term submersion so if you're doing
stuff in damp or wet locations or direct burial applications they have all of these same Styles
right the the L style we can still the end to end you know fixing a splice if we have to just
like this guy we still have two that come in from One Direction three you know they're completely
configurable but uh it's just one important thing to note I've seen a lot of people use
just these things all day every day no matter where inside outside but you gotta understand
there's very different applications and essentially it's just a bar of metal and they
form different plastic around that bar of metal this is what's on the inside of these things so
essentially it's just a ground bus right like there's some terminals there's threads there's
a little bit of antioxidant in there just to try to help the effects of oxidization on conductors
because that happens now some tips for working with these things obviously when you start
working with something like this you're working with a lot of really large conductors as well
these large conductors they could be copper or they could be a lot lighter they could be
aluminum not not much lighter when you're talking about this many conductors this thing is heavy as
it is this is several pounds you know like this feels like I could it's like a I don't know like a
two to three pound weight maybe maybe I don't know it's heavy this is like super heavy so when you're
dealing with something like this it's important to make sure as you're cutting your conductors that
you lay this in there and you cut the conductors to the application and make sure you bend them and
get them all so that this thing will sit actually in this enclosure where you want it if you're out
here and you're trying to put conductors in and you're just like randomly like leaving this thing
flop and you try to go to get put it back in there by the time you have all those large conductors
and you're gonna try to like smash this into the box then you've got other ones that are you know
like say we had another six barrel one and we're trying to like smash all of them in there you can
see that all these big conductors that don't want to bend by Nature once you add them all together
into one block this whole thing is not going to want to bend so it's really really important to
get this thing placed where you want it and make sure that every conductor that you run to it that
you measure it very precisely and get it all bent up make sure that it bends so that it naturally
wants to lay in the back of the enclosure rather than just pulling something out and smacking it in
and then it starts to want to pull forward because you didn't take the time to plan it out one other
thing to mention when you're working with really large wires is always trying to keep the wires
as straight as possible so like doing little Corrections while you're working on them just
makes them straight if you like leave wires in there like this and they're big wires especially
it's so hard to try to manipulate and move all of that stuff so this is aluminum it's a lot easier
to work with and the wire is smaller it's 250 aluminum so it's pretty easy to manipulate but one
thing that I always try to do is just make sure when you're doing your work that you try to keep
it as clean and neat and straight as possible make sure that you don't have all of this stuff pushing
out so that when you go to put your cover back on your cover actually goes on and it's not keeping
everything inside that's a poor poor move don't do that so that's another thing trying to get a
lot of these covers there's like eight foot gutter covers it's like a one foot piece of Steel that it
is eight feet long and you get all these screws and you might be on a service call by yourself
and you're sitting there holding onto this thing trying to like undo each one of these screws and
then when you get the last screw out the last thing you want is that thing you just go boom
in your face because there's all the spring-loaded pressure behind it from somebody that just didn't
care and they just like stuff it all in there put the cover on that's just hack work so don't do
stuff like that make it easier on everybody make it easier on yourself plan your stuff out and try
to do a really good job of making sure it all sticks in the back and worst case scenario best
case scenario really use mountables mountables are red because you can actually secure them and make
sure nothing goes anywhere anybody that has to work on it in the future they can choose to take
it out if they want to and put it back or they can have it mounted right in the back and they
can pull conductors out put new ones in it's like so slick to have the mountable options so now one
thing that's not talked about a lot is the torque requirements for something like that it's actually
recommended that you torque these things the the biggest problems with Polaris Taps tend to be
that they're either over torqued or they're under torqued moisture gets in them people put too many
conductors they might put multiple conductors in a hole and they're not listed for that or
that they put finely stranded copper in it wasn't listed to be used with finely stranded conductors
anyways uh let me know if you guys have any questions down below if there's anything
that you all use specifically or have seen haven't seen Blown Away by like this craziness
um there's actually a lot of other models too they sent me so many different models um and
this is nowhere near everything that they have so uh love you crazy people I'll see you next one