Are All Wire Lever Nut Connectors Created Equal?

how's it going you guys it's Scott with everyday home repairs now you don't have to watch many of my DIY electrical videos before you find out I'm a huge fan of Wago 221 lever nuts I think for diy-ers they're by far the best wire connector and that is why I have them in my default electrical kit I have two wire three wire five wire and the new inline splice I just always carry those on me for any of my residential electrical projects now I'm usually sending you below the video in the description a link and you'll jump over to our Amazon store where you can find the water 221 kits which are a great place to start off but when you go on Amazon you probably start to see a lot of very very similar wire connectors that are lever nuts they have the transparent housing they look super similar but they're quite a bit cheaper so the question is these knockoff lever nuts are they any good so that's what we're going to test today I have two different types with me and we're going to open those up look inside look at the critical components of the spring that holds your conductors in and the bus bar then we'll truly put them to the test I'll run a similar 20 minute loading cycle with 23 amps going through these wire connectors and then we'll use a thermal camera on my iPhone to see how much are they actually heating up and are they heating up more than what we saw with the Wago 221 lever nut and I can honestly say out of the more than 350 videos I've done on this channel this video has the most surprising results hands down no competition for any products I've tested thus far but without further Ado let's go ahead and start taking apart some of these lever notes and comparing the internals so just touching on the basic features we have Wago knockoff one and knock off number two over here they all come in two wire three wire five wire now Wago two two ones are going to have the inline splice the 2401 which I do like for some different lighting applications and then also within an electrical panel I do not see those in some of these knockoffs so I'm sure they're coming I'm sure they will knock it off but currently they do not do that now from a basic operations standpoint the levers release you place your conductor within the transparent housing you can see what's going on there that it's in contact with the bus bar and then that is how you secure it knockoff one's a little different actually so you lift up that lever and it's coming from the opposite direction so it's not coming from this side it is coming from the opposite direction again you can see the wire see it's across the bus bar and then go ahead and close that lever and then number two knockoff number two is very similar to the wagos and that is how you're going to actuate it you can kind of see it in there this housing is a little bit milkier and less transparent than let's say the Wago lever nut now these are going to work at least the two two one Wago does make a larger one that can work with 10 gauge but this is going to work for your 12 and 14 gauge wire and that holds true for knockoff one and knock off two now I'm not sure if you guys have ran across this but there is actually a test port on both ends with Wago you could test and make contact with the bus bar from this end or you can make it from this end that is very nice when you have a circuit and you're troubleshooting because you can keep all your wire connectors together and easily test with your clamp meter or your multimeter knockoff number one because the design is going to have one test port where you can easily make contact from the back side and it's effective now classic to a very cheap knockoff knockoff number two has made a port here on one side and a port here for two side but at least for our market and the standard probes that you'd get on a multimeter clamp meter you actually cannot get the probe inside so the opening there they did that part of the design they copied that part of the design but they actually did not understand the size of these probes and you cannot test the bus bar so that's already one negative for the knockoff number two but more importantly what is inside so I'll pop off all these end caps we'll look at the springs and the bus bars to disassemble these actually you're just reversing the manufacturing process the end cap is the last thing to go on and that holds in the springs the levers and the bus bar so we're just going to pluck off each of these end caps and knock off number one gave me the most trouble but I am most familiar with the wagons I've disassembled those multiple times so here are all the components of the Wago 221 overall the housing's by far the best in terms of just the overall feel build quality tax and ease to see through so you could see the bus bar and your conductor the bus bar also is the best in class it seems to have the best finish and plating which I'm sure helps to reduce the chances of corrosion and knowing that we have small contact areas with the conductor which would sit on the bus bar like this we have to make the most of that contact area over time and you would not want any type of corrosion or contaminants getting in there because that would raise our resistance and then the Springs here are somewhat contained within the levers you can pop those off but that is what really presses these conductors inside the housing down on this bus bar but let's look at our knockoff number one so end cap a little bit harder to get off housing I say is the second best again pretty easy to see through you can see some of the certifications that I assume they have on there bus bar is definitely of a different design bus bar does have some plating but does not seem to be of the caliber of the Wago this is a little subjective but that's my Impressions Springs are packed together and it is easier to see how this works in knock-up number one so we'd press that spring down we would insert in and then the bus bar is at the top so you'd insert in your conductor spring would release pressing the conductor up against the bus bar and then that is how you're going to make connection between your two wires your three wires or your five wires overall from the first impressions not too bad and then we got knockoff number two end cap housing housing is my least favorite you can see it is a little cloudy loader lower quality in terms of plastic the levers are very cheap they do feel flimsy you could definitely have a failure with those actually just snapping and then spring stayed in place with the overall bus bar again busbar has some type of plating but of a lower quality and the bus bar again is on that top side so if we look at the compression we would compress down that spring we would bring our conductor in the housing here slide it through and then that spring is going to release and press that conductor up against that bus bar that's going to be on the top so knock off one knock off two bus bar on top spring pushes up against Wago is going to be on the bottom now one thing to note between these knockoffs is the Springs are not independent like you know Wago so you would have some continuity between the spring itself considering they are going to be in contact with your conductors and they are one apiece across each of the wires so after tearing those apart Wago 221 are by far my favorite knockoff number one would be my second place and then knock up number two is definitely questionable but the real question is running load through these how do they heat up do they heat up at the same rates or is one dramatically different than the other so what I'm going to do is I already have knockoff number one loaded up I'm going to run this and test it every five minutes I'll show you the thermal image after 25 minutes of running and then I'll plot those points out versus the Wagga 221 leverknot but also versus a wire nut and going directly into the outlet kind of as a baseline perspective so we can see when we load this up it'll be loaded up at 23 amps how hot do these get and is there a noticeable difference so the results are in I have them on my laptop I'll share my screen and show that graph I only went for a 20 minute duration opposed to a 25 minute duration as I mentioned so I can match up with testing results I had in the past so let's take a look at the results from knockoff number one over the four test points that I took every five minutes and remember we have our Baseline that's when I was just testing the screw terminals on the side of an outlet with no wire connector in the hot conductor side of the circuit then we did a wire nut this was on a pass video with a maximum temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit and you'll see that with the orange line here the Wago 221 lever net was higher than I got up to a maximum temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit and then I just completed the knockoff number one testing now knock off number one was higher than even the Wago lever nut but it did not continue to progressively get worse so after 20 minutes of testing with 23 amps running through this circuit I was 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher in knockoff number one compared to our worst case before which was the Wago 221 now that's nothing compared to knock off number two so let's look at what we saw there now for knockoff number two I came back out and started the testing and I was definitely a little surprised with the first data point should be no do you see the face plate on there I was putting a blank also in there so I'd encapsulate the electrical box and we wouldn't have more heat rejection than we would in a normal scenario but looking at our results you can see even with the first five minute interval I'm already at 167 degrees Fahrenheit and it continued to progressively get worse all the way up to 184 degrees Fahrenheit now I will unhide this last column now this will show you at least with Wago 221 lever nuts and also wire nuts commonly the max temperature specification which would be 221 degrees Fahrenheit I don't know about knockoff number twos I can't find the specifications I'm not sure if it's certified and what the test results are the sheer separation in the the results is a bit scary when it comes to this knockoff number two lever nut and substantially worse than Wagga 221 so taking into account what we saw internally and also the results of actually testing these things knockoff number two is absolutely no way going to be considered for any of your projects do not touch that with a 10-foot pole and I will show a link in the description of both of these knockoffs so you know exactly which one I tested but it seems that same exact lever nut is multiple Brands so be careful if you're gonna go down the path of these knockoffs now for knockoff number one honestly pretty encouraging results a whole world of difference between knockoff number two and knockoff number one but for my money from a safety standpoint Wago 11 out is going to be about twice as expensive around 48 cents per connector on a kind of Blended average across two wire three wire and five wire you can save about 50 percent with going with knockoff number one but for me it's not worth it even though the results were much better on that green lever knockoff number one compared to knock up number two but let me know what you guys think I was completely surprised by those results I could not believe the absolute difference between Wago 221 knockoff number one and then the dramatic difference between knockoff number two and if you want to see another project I do where you can move an outlet you can hide an outlet behind a flat screen TV on the wall and you can do that without doing any drywall work any painting work and make it an efficient clean project check out this video right here and I'll walk you through everything and we'll even use a few wagos in that project so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on the next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 87,903

Keywords:

Id: Ux4rEwHOIbI

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023