So we have this recurring problem at my house where the lightning strikes and as soon as it does power goes out, it comes back on unit, doesn't communicate, and so what happens? Is that with the lightning sneer earth strike or striking a pole or whatever the case? May be you get these little transients high voltage, spikes and it causes my control to go on the fritz causes everything to kind of go on and off all at once. I know what happens when there's lightning storms. I know it happens when the power goes out. I don't know exactly what's causing it, whether it's the fact that everything all the power on everything is coming up at once and we're having some induced currents going into the low-voltage circuit or whether it's directly due to the lightning itself and the transients.

And what I do know is that we consistently have this problem, so I'm gon na do a fix that I've heard a couple times that helps when you don't run shielded cable with communicating systems which I didn't. You see right here, regular old, thermostat wire, where you can use the leftover conductors, which we have for leftover conductors as a sort of a shield by grounding them on one end, this is our ABCD connectors, which are green, yellow white red and that's all that we're Using for our 24 volts in our communications and our red and white, our 24 volts, yellow and green are communications. We have these leftover wires, as you can see here. Our orange brown, black and blue that are unused.

We're gon na take those and we're going to ground them from both sides. We're gon na ground them in here and leave them open on the other end, so we don't create a ground loop. So when you are using almost as a sort of shielding, then you only connect them on one end, not on both. So this is going to the outside right here, just our green and yellow, because the outside unit has its own transformer and then inside we've got four additional, so we've got six additional going outside and four additional going inside and so we're gon na.

Take all of these and we're gon na connect it in to a proper ground, a good-quality ground and looking in this unit. We can get a ground inside this right here, but I think what we're gon na do is just run it through these other wires and then ground it here against the blower. This is a factory grounding lug, so we're just gon na use that as our ground, something I do want to be clear about. Is that the reason why we're connecting them together here under wire nuts? So that way we double lug under these ABCD connectors? Because that's one of the common causes that we see a poor connection is trying to fit two conductors under a single lug.

So we connect them further back from the condenser and the controller. So that's also where we're going to pull the extra wires off of that we're gon na then connect to ground as our as our shield. So, whenever I'm gon na twist together a lot of wires, I strip them long, even though, of course, I'm not gon na leave them. That long just makes it a lot easier for me to really tightly twist them together.

Instead of doing this in like a shoddy way, I'm going to actually connect them all together to a larger gauge stranded wire using a heat shrink, butt splice, and then I'm going to connect it down to a ring connector. So that way, it connects nicely here all right, so they were too big when I put them all together to get it under one butt: splice, I'm gon na do two separate butt, splices and then I'll splice, the two pieces of stranded underneath one end I'll show You what I mean crimper design for insulated terminals and I'll heat, that up to heat shrink that down real nice, but it's these are really really tight. I really like this crimper too even got the color codes on the jaws and you know which insulated terminal put under which jaw now the one thing to be careful with those you don't want to put too large a terminal underneath one of these jaws. Otherwise, you got to take the whole thing apart to get it back out all right, so I'm gon na heat shrink down this first set just to be dramatic, so you can see it we're using a flame like this.

You got it really making sure to stand. It off a little bit, so you don't melt the wires. I mean in this case we're only using him for a ground anyway. So it's not that critical! It's not gon na hurt if I compromise the conductor a little bit but for demonstration purposes, just important that you don't heat the wire.

Oh, that one I got. I generally use a smaller torch than this heat gun. It would be the preferred way, but this is what I happen to have on my trucks is what we're using. If I was doing this on a conductor where I was worried about potential shorting, I would keep the wires a little shorter underneath in this particular case.

I'm more interested in connection than I am about. You know preventing a short, but again this is definitely gon na, be a solid connection, get all of our all of our additional conductors, but spliced connect it together with number fourteen stranded wire underneath a single ring connector. Hopefully, the idea is is that any inductance or little signals that are picked up in the wire will be redirected harmlessly to ground on one side versus causing a communication fault, at least that's the idea, but we'll see - and I will report back and let you know If this fixes it or not - but I do know that in several cases where maybe you should have run shielded cable but didn't this is a fix that actually serves the purpose. All right, i'm brian, with hvac school thanks for watching.