this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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You can absolutely use a larger wire (lower gauge) and high quality splices to get a repair that doesn't add any significant amount of resistance for this use case.
If your wire diameter is larger then your resistance is lower, not greater (so 18-24 awg in your example, or equivalent in mm). Then you use low resistance splice methods, not a shitty Amazon butt splice.
Not sure where you're coming from. "Replace the entire wire" is the knuckle dragging, high labor cost low technical aptitude solution.
If a rodent chewed through a ton of wires then yeah, you're replacing the whole thing because it's not cost effective to look for every nick and chew and patch them all. But a single short or nick? You can totally patch it, and saying otherwise just isn't facts.