What heat-gun for solder-seal connectors?

[AntarcticPilot]

We should also remember that "standard" doesn't mean "best", it means ... "standard". Houses and boats are wired to standards not because these are the best ways (although good practice clearly influences standards) but so that someone else can come along and know how things have been done.

At a very trivial level, there is absolutely no physical reason not to use brown for neutral and blue for live when wiring a house, but there are very good practical reasons.

The standard specifying M10 threads is not there because M10 threads are the best possible, but so that M10 nuts from one manufacturer will fit M10 bolts from another.

Having been involved in creating standards, JD has hit the nail on the head. I will say that in my own field we did try to ensure that standards reflected best practice (I was involved with ISO TC211), but we were also aware that the field was developing. This forum has seen an example where one of the standards I was concerned with could be interpreted in an unhelpful way - it involved the behaviour of geographic data at 180 longitude, which could result in data not being displayed. Partly through my input the ambiguity was corrected in a later version of the standard. So, standards aren't always the best way of doing something, though cases where they are actually bad should be few and far between, especially in well established fields.

 

[jim.howes]

If you have a boat where every connection, every terminal, every switch etc etc is waterproof, you have possibly the only one in the World.

No boat builder or marine electrician working on used boats uses 100% waterproof connectors. To suggest otherwise it total bollox. What would be the point, for example, of using glue lined heatshrink spade terminals on all of the wires that go to switches, fuse panels, busbars etc etc (most of which are also not waterproof, unless in especially exposed locations) when those terminals are then going to be pushed onto female spade terminals, the joint of which is then not waterproof ?

What are you going to do, cover everything in sealant ?

If your boat is so wet in the main saloon and sleeping cabins that the wiring needs waterproof connections you might want to attend to the leaks.

I did not suggest you try to make every connection( switches, fuse panels etc) waterproof which I agree would be impossible but, if you are joining 2 wires together(the whole point of the of the original post) then it is surely for your own benefit and peace of mind to make your connections as waterproof as possible no matter where they are in the vessel.