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I bought a new 30 inch Marley electric base board heater to replace the one I tore out 15 years ago because my then 9 year old son peed on it every night instead of making it to the toilet.
But I have the standard black, white, and bare ground coming out of the house. No easy connections. BTW, I've done a lots of wiring, and every kind of house renovation from plumbing to flooring to walls to ceilings. I've even built a whole house from a kit with hundreds of pieces of wood and thousands of nails. I didn't put in the foundation posts since they needed pins that were within 1/4 inch on a 32 foot diagonal, and the roof because its 12/12 pitch and I'm scared ****less of heights, but I'm done other less far off the ground.
Instructions say there are two sides for connection:
Left side: bare wire for ground, black wire that goes into a wire nut with anther black wire coming out of the wire nut which goes into this little round device, red wire that comes out of the little round device and goes into the heating coil.
Right side:bare wire for ground, black wire going into wire nut, red wire coming out of wire nut and going into heating coil.
It looks like it would be better to use the right side and connect the black to the black house, the red to the white house, and of course the bare to the bare?
That would leave the little device on the left untouched.
Not familiar with the heater in question but do NOT believe any BLACK wire should be connected to a RED wire. The copper bare wire is a DIRECT ground for safety reasons. Electricity has a enter and a exit which is the RED and BLACK wire. They should NEVER meet.
The round thing (guessing) is probably a relay or thermostat control switch.
I rigged up a switch from a thermostat to a fan for a ceiling vent to the outside...it worked for me. Had a problem in it being a dual purpose thermostat (hot or cold) when setting the control temp switch...took a while but figured it out since I was making a custom set up.
Concerning the original question...NEVER connect two different color wires together.
Sometimes the red wire is considered or used for three way systems. On 240 volt circuits the red wire can designate L1 or L2 of line voltage like with a electric water heater.
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