In this next section, we're going to give you an overview of the wiring of your system. The first
part, we're going to show you how to splice your pump wire to your drop wire. We're also going to
show you how to hook up your electrical sensors and splice those if needed. And then finally,
we'll talk about hooking up your solar panels to your controller using your extension wires.
We've been told that splicing the pump wire is one of the most difficult parts of this installation.
We think it's pretty easy, and so if that's the most difficult part, you should have no
problem. We're gonna walk through the various steps of the splice. So all of our pump cable
comes with around 15 feet of wire off the end. For most of the installations, you're going to
need to add your own wire in order to extend the length of it. What you're looking for is
three strand submersible wire between 14 and 10 gauge depending on your installation length. It
is PVC jacketed to make it waterproof and robust against chafing in the well casing. We're going
to start by preparing our pump wire. As you can see, we have our three strands of wire coming out
and each one has a number on it: one, two, and three. Two of the wires are already stripped,
and we're going to strip off insulation of the third wire. One thing you'll notice about this
wire, is it is cut at different lengths. Doesn't matter which one is which, but we have one short,
one medium, one long. What this is going to do is when we do our splice on the end of it,
it results in a bulge in the wire, and that way all the bulges don't line up in the same
spot and it's easy to shrink the tubing over the top of it. Next, we prepare our drop wire.
We're going to do something very similar. First we're gonna remove the outside jacketing using
a razor blade. Now gonna be very careful. You want to cut just through the outside
layer and not nick the insulation on the inside of the wire. If you take your time,
you can get a nice clean cut on the outside jacket without damaging any of the wires within.
A lot of wire comes with another inside layer that can also be removed. Which leaves us with
our three strands exposed. A lot of people ask, "why is this a DC pump with three wires?" Well,
since it's a brushless motor, it actually has three phases within the motor,
and that means we need three wires. One for each of the phases going down to the motor. From here,
we want to match up our wires. We have a black wire, we have our brown/red wire,
and we have our blue wire. What we want to do is butt them up end-to-end and then cut the lengths,
so they end up exactly the same length. The closer you can get these wires together,
the better it will be for your splicing in the long run. With our three wires exposed, we want to
butt them up and line them up with our pump wire. Since the black wires are shortest, we don't need
to cut it. We can line up our red wire, and cut it with our wire cutters. Again, overlapping the
black wire the proper distance, we can line up our blue wire and cut our blue wire. As you can
see pretty closely, the wires align and when we strip them and then crimp them together, there'll
be a nice straight connection. Using our wire strippers again, we'll strip off outside jacket.
And now we're ready to start the crimping process. All of our pumps come with our crimp kit. I
can open it up and pull out the shrink tubing and the butt crimps. Using our shrink tubing,
we can make sure we have enough length on our wire so we can slide the shrink tube all the
way on the wire while we're doing our splice. In this case, I think I cut it a little short,
so we're going to go a little bit further down the wire. We like double installation;
in case one layer fails, you have a backup layer protecting your
electrical connections. We'll slide the large shrink tube over your drop wire.
And then we'll slide the small shrink tubing over each of your three strands.
There's a couple of different tools you can use for crimping your wires.
We have our standard electrician pliers, and we also have a crimper
designed for crimping butt splices. Put our butt crimp over the end of the wire,
and then using the appropriate location on the crimpers, we're going to crimp this down.
As you can see, if we use the pliers in the right location, we get a very strong crimp and it's not
going to come off. We'll continue to do the same thing for the other two wires. One tip that's kind
of hard to see is I do like the indentation of the crimpers to end up on the backside of
the crimp where the seam is not located. That prevents the seam from opening up and making
it more difficult to crimp your wire. Now we have the crimps onto our drop wire and we're
going to crimp onto our pump wire. sometimes it's easier to hold everything together if you
insert the butt splice into your pliers first and then do your crimping. I am doing two crimps per
butt splice in this case in order to make sure we have a nice tight electrical connection.
We move on to our red wire. And finally we'll crimp our blue wire. This is your last chance. You
want to make sure everything's connected nice and tightly. Next, we're gonna slide the shrink tubing
that you previously put onto your wires over the butt splice. This is adhesive-lined shrink tubing,
which means there's an adhesive layer on the internal side of the shrink tubing and when it
heats up that adhesive layer is going to melt and it's gonna really seal around that wire,
giving us a waterproof connection. What we recommend is the night before in the shop
to do this splice and take the time in order to get a nice waterproof connection. We like
using a heat gun. A heat gun is going to give you nice even heat around your wire and your
shrink tubing and it's gonna melt that internal adhesive and make sure it seals up really tightly
around the wire. But like most of our customers, they're out in the middle of the field, and one
of the reasons they're using solar is because they don't have electricity at the site. In that case,
either a torch or butane lighter can be used. You just have to be a lot more careful as you evenly
heat the shrink tubing around all sides and make sure you don't burn it. So using a butane lighter,
we can evenly heat one side, and then around the other side in order to make our connection.
Take your time, as you don't want to burn the shrink tubing or the wire,
or else you're gonna have to start over. Here we have a nice connection. You can see, there's
a very small amount of adhesive flowing out of the end of the shrink tubing. The rest of these,
I'm going to use the heat gun and make it go a little faster. Put the setting on high. We
can nice and evenly heat the shrink tubing on all sides, ensuring a waterproof connection.
There we go. So this looks really good. As you can see, the shrink tubing has squeezed down
around that wire and that butt crimp. We can see the indentation of the butt crimp inside,
and also on the very edges you can see we have adhesive squeezing out of the end of that shrink
tubing. That's exactly what we want to see. What that means is the adhesive is melted and
it's sealed both the shrink tubing and the wire together so no water can get into that
connection. Next we're gonna put our outer layer shrink tubing over the whole connection. But
this is really important. You don't want to forget this. You either want to write down the numbers of
your wire -- that one is black, that two is blue, and that three is brown/red -- or you can use the
provided numbers in order to relabel your wire. We'll do that real quick here. We're going to grab
the other end of our wire, and again, we're gonna take off this outside jacket. With the outside
jacket removed, we can relabel our wires. We know black is one. We know blue is two.
And red is three. This is a very simple but important step. What happens is if you mix up
these wires and you hook it up to the controller, then the pump is gonna run backwards, and you're
gonna be trying to troubleshoot an install with a pump down in the well, which makes it much more
difficult. So with our wires labeled we can move on to our final heat shrink application. We'll
take our big tube and we will slide it right over so those crimps are roughly right in the center.
Again, you can use your lighter. It's gonna take a while as you slowly heat up the entire shrink
tube. You have a butane torch. That's gonna make this whole process go a lot faster out in the
field. Or if you plan ahead, you can do it the night before in the shop with your heat gun.
As you're doing the heating, you want to take your
time and slowly work your way around the shrink tubing in order to heat it evenly,
which in turn melts the internal adhesive and allows it to flow encasing the wire,
your other shrink tubing and your butt crimps in an extra layer of adhesive and shrink tube.
With the shrinking done, we have a nice tight waterproof connection. Again we'll
take a quick look at the end of the cable. You can see there's a little
bit of adhesive that squeezed out. That's exactly what you want to see.