What Wire Connector is the Best? Wire Nut VS Wago TESTED

in today's video we're going to be testing the huego 221 series electrical connector and putting it against a traditional wire nut now last month i released a video about these things because i really love them they're great time savers and they have a ton of benefits over a regular wire nut but many us-based electricians didn't agree they said these things were fire starters you could flick them off with one finger and they never could work because they can't conduct enough power because there's just not enough metal inside those connectors the overload test is one of the most important things you can check because the connector's job is to conduct electricity and i had a lot of comments saying these things just can't do the job because they're too small and they don't make a good enough connection so in the us most circuits are either 15 or 20 amps that's going to be things like your wall switches outlets and most of your common needs and the only reason i'm using ground wire like this is because i didn't want any kind of wire insulation to interfere with the test i made these loops on the opposite end of the wires because i needed to connect it up to a circuit to actually put power through now what you're seeing there are two devices one of them is a power supply and the other one is a load tester and with that connector in the middle it's going to take the brunt of all the power going between those devices and by adding a thermal camera in the middle we'll be able to see how hot that connector actually gets and this camera can identify the hottest part of anything it sees inside this square so right now it's 55 degrees fahrenheit for our starting point i'm going right to the maximum rating for this connector which is 20 amps now remember in your house you're usually going to have 15 or 20 amp circuits so this connector is actually rated to be used on them now we've just broken the 10 minute mark we're still at 20 amps and the connector is at about 72 degrees i added my clamp on ammeter just to triple check my numbers and you can see at the 15 minute mark the connector is still only about 77 degrees now i wanted to overload the connector so i double the amperage to 40 amps now that is two times the amount that this connector is actually rated for now we're at 40 amps for 10 minutes the connector is definitely getting hotter it's about 150 degrees now we're going to do the final test and increase our amperage to 60 amps now old houses used to have 100 amps for the entire house so 60 amps is a lot of power and this is the maximum amount i can do with this setup after 10 minutes this was the result at 60 amps our connector had reached 273 degrees which is definitely hot but we're at three times the rated capacity at this point things weren't really changing so i decided to shut the test down and take a close look at the connector and externally the wiggle looked exactly the same hadn't melted there was no smoke coming off it and i wanted to see if in fact the levers even still worked or maybe it got cooked inside so i flipped them up and the connector came right off you have to remember this thing was being tested for 40 minutes we started at its maximum setting and went all the way up to 60 amps and this connector pretty much looks brand new but how well would a wire nut do so here i'm using an ideal wire nut that's rated for the same amount of wires that the lego was and i wanted to pre-twist it because i knew if i didn't do this i get a lot of comments about it even though the directions say it's not required with the nut in place we're ready to begin now for this test i'm just going to set the load to the full 60 amps because even the wago didn't have any problems at either 20 or 40 amps so i wanted to see how hot would a wire not get under the same 60 amp load the test is running you can see that the wire nut is already starting to heat up we're hitting about 208 degrees now for the moment of truth we're hitting 10 minutes and we're running at 60 amps and our connector is at 242 degrees now compared to the waygo this is definitely cooler because the wago was running at 273 degrees once the wire not cooled down i removed it i looked at it closely and i didn't see any problems no melting or any other issues compared to the waygo it was exactly the same a common i saw a lot of was the huegos could pull off so easily you could almost just flick them off with your finger so to put that to the test i'm using a special pull gauge and this is kind of like one of those scales that you use to weigh a fish except it has one key difference it locks in on the maximum setting even after the weight is removed i inserted two 14 gauge wires into the way go and lock them in position and put it inside my vise but as you can see the vise isn't actually holding on to the wire it's just keeping that connector from pulling free with a firm pull on the wire they eventually break free of the connector and now we can see the result so it actually took 35 pounds of force for that wire to break free that amount of force is the same as hanging four gallons of milk off of that connector now we're going to do a meltdown test because i got a number of comments from people saying these connectors just weren't durable and they couldn't hold up now for this test i'm actually going to use their three conductor version along with a larger size wire nut to see how well they would hold up against intense heat and i started with the wire nut and it did just fine until 910 degrees and then it started to break down and over two minutes this is what happened now i set up the lego and it didn't show any signs of change until i hit 1100 degrees fahrenheit now that's a lot of heat but once i set it to that in about the same two minutes the connector was completely destroyed after doing all these tests the bottom line is that these connectors are really well engineered it's amazing that these things could hold up under 60 amps of power but either way whichever one you choose just pick the one that works for you and you're the most comfortable with but i wouldn't think twice if you decide to use one of these wagos they're definitely a capable connector and the slight temperature difference i saw between the wire nut and the wago at 60 amps wasn't enough to make me think they were superior in any kind of conductivity sort of way either way i hope you found this video helpful and gave you some good information if you liked it please give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more videos coming up

Channel: Silver Cymbal

Views: 690,137

Keywords: wago, wago connector, wire nuts, are wire nuts bad, are wago connectors bad, wago connector test, wago wires, best wire nut, best wire connector, how to connect wire, how to splice wire

Id: B1pmuRsf1co

Length: 5min 50sec (350 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021