You should strip the wires such that the nut has good overlap with the insulation, and no tape is needed.

Cost. I personally use them everywhere but that's because I hate wire nuts.

I just bought an assortment pack of them. I have to rewire some parts of the house this spring and add some new lights and ceiling fans I am so tired of twist couplers...

Looks really clean; the heat management in particular is pretty clever. How well does the joint hold up under use? I've only seen braze joints in fixed piping systems, just curious about the strength for other applications.

Why not for permanent installs? Too expensive?

The lessons:

• heat management: think about your strategy for heating the material before lighting the torch and start pointing the torch at things

• It was good to wrap a wet rag around the shank near the handle, to slow down heat propagation that would melt/burn the rubber

• Surface prep, even for a quick/dirty braze repair on a garden tool.

• To do correct surface prep, fully breaking the broken thing may be required and beneficial

For DIY there is nothing better than Wago. I love them for semi-permanent stuff. Understand why pros might not want to spend several dollars per box on connectors but for small projects they are amazing.

Fun explosive surprise sometimes

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As someone who just rewired and added lights to a bedroom, I cannot recommend the Wago wire nuts enough. Makes everything so much simpler. I even put them in the outlets because it makes it way easier to disconnect an outlet if you have a "pigtail" from the wago nut to the outlet - if you need to disconnect the outlet, just unlock from the Wago, no need to untwist the wire from the screw on the outlet!

I never have the right Wago on hand.

Good call. I like to overengineer things. Plus then you can point to the dowels and say "look, that's where I fixed it" and people will be impressed.

just use wagos and enter the 21st century

I use these to test my 1lb antweight bit builds. So damn handy.

When it was solid and stranded mixed, would always loose twist the solid wires, wind in the stranded and have it longer than the solid pair...when finishing the twist it tightens up holding the stranded. Single solid...and single stranded, ugh..

Everywhere I've gone they have used tape (industrial). I've even gotten bitched at for not using it.

stranded-to-solid is best done with a Taped WAGO, or a bus bar with crimped U or Ring connectors, or with crimped spade or barrel connectors. The idea is each type of conductor has its own fastening mechanism, since there is no good option to put them together in one fastener.

If I can't do one of the above, I prefer to solder the connection, wire nut it (or insulated crimp), tape it, and then put it in a grounded isolation box, like any metal housing.

The thing about WAGOs is that they are subject to being opened accidentally. It isn't easy, but I've had it happen to me. So I tape them.

Oh the less costly imitators of WAGO are garbage, don't buy any of them to use on your home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jJqSGMB5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WschUxip-4w

The problem is that oftentimes people don’t actually twist the wires together, they wrap one around the other. This is most common in cases where the gauges are different or joined solid core to stranded, because one wire is more flexible than the other. Basically, you want to see the two wires spiraling together, like a DNA strand from a high school biology book, and not one wire spiraling around the other untwisted wire, like one wire is the red stripe on a candy cane and the other is the white core.

If you end up with the latter, the wire-nut is only gripping the outer wire and the inner core can slip free. So while the technically best scenario is to properly twist the wires together and then cap with a wire-nut, the second best option is to put both wires straight into the nut and use that to twist them together as it will have at least some purchase on both wires that way. And using the straight into wire-nut makes the same connection reliably, whereas twisting first may instead wrap one around the other, which is a distant third place in terms of connection quality.

really a stranded to solid splice shouldn't be nutted... it is allowed, but like you said is difficult to get a good solid connection.

Do I just renail the treads into the stringers to fix the creaking?

Love the design!

Can be bad. A poor nut connection could be held together by the tape.

No actual electrician I know of uses tape, and in fact they use it as a tell if work has been done DIY or licensed a lot of the time.

You... remove the tape? Electrical tape is like the easiest thing to take off in the world.

Eww, I don't want snails falling into my escargot!

Really pretty—and creative!