Terminating CCA (copper clad aluminum) wires

[sokoloff]

Some jackass (me) installed a bunch of under-landscape wiring during a lawn renovation/sprinkler/outdoor lighting and speakers project.
Now that all the grass and plants are coming in nicely, it's time to turn my attention to the speakers and lighting aspects.

The jackass part is that some of the wire I installed is 14 gauge x 4 conductor copper-clad aluminum speaker wire, which is spawned directly from the devil I believe. The wire, particularly the ends that sat exposed over the winter, is an absolute bear to strip and terminate. Often removing the insulation removes a lot of crumbly aluminum wire as well. If I trim the wire back several feet (where I have enough to do that) or even take virgin wire that's been inside, it's still difficult to get the insulation off without significant loss of conductors. My advice is "don't use this CCA stuff; it's garbage!"

However, I have a handful of runs of a few hundred feet now buried next to sprinkler pipes, other copper wires that I don't want to disturb, under hardscaping and landscaping, so it's not practical to replace the wire with something made of actual conductors, so I need to try to terminate and use this.

I'm considering carefully stripping with a straight blade, using Noalox goop, landing the conductors in 5.08mm pluggable terminal blocks (the "green" EDGK type), plugging those into a small PCB and zip tying the outer cable for strain relief in the field, then using the PCB to carry the signal out to another cable to the speakers or lighting. I have 3 speaker and 2 low voltage landscape lighting runs done with this stuff, so 10 "ends" and 40 "wire ends" in total.

Any tips?
Any contrary guidance? Thoughts on crimp terminals vs the screw lands on those connectors?

[Gregg]

Unless you can totally seal the copper plated aluminum from moisture, it will continue to disintegrate from internal electrolysis due to the different ionic potentials of copper and aluminum.  My guess is that it is merely copper electroplated as thinly as possible onto the aluminum, not a true copper cladding. Copper electroplate is done with copper sulfate which is highly corrosive and very hard to totally remove from wire strands. 
If it was true copper clad, you may be able to get solder to stick to the copper.  You may be able to lightly twist the clean strands together, tin them with solder, lightly crimp into uninsulated terminals just enough to hold them in place and fill any voids with more solder.  Remove all flux then waterproof the joints with something like silicone II. 
You are probably going to have to replace it all anyway and just bite the bullet and start digging.  Bury semi flexible plastic tubing like the drip watering stuff with your new wiring inside so you have a chance of pulling new wire through in the future.

[ratio]

These are made specifically for connecting to Al wires, although they'll need to be in an enclosure of some kind, as opposed to direct burial.

[Brumby]

That link is malformed - here is the corrected version:
http://www.idealindustries.ca/products/wire_termination/twist-on/twister_al-cu.php

I never did like those things, though - even for less unfavourable environments.

[ratio]

Thanks for that, I guess I need more BBCode practice.

[controlfreak]

You would definitely need CU/AL rated connections for CCA.  Without the right rating on your termination it won't last, especially outdoors.  Be happy that you didn't run CCS though...  If you forget something is CCS and cut it with the wrong cutters, you just ruined your cutters.

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk

[Brumby]

Thanks for that, I guess I need more BBCode practice.

You weren't far off getting it right.  All that was needed was to remove the extra http:// at the start of the URL tag as well as both double quotes.