Most good crimps are superior in mechanical strength to solder. I don't believe that soldering the ground wire is allowed as it must hold on long enough to open the OCPD in a fault, and a good fault can melt open the solder joint first.
I do mostly industrial wiring and home wiring drives me nuts. You can't access anything, a contortionist couldn't get to half this stuff, there's no schematic, and only the Shadow knows what science experiment is buried inside the walls because it was cheaper to have my cousin Billy Bob than to hire a pro (though in some areas Billy Bob is the local pro...).
With the way the ninnies are running around, lead will be outlawed. They already bar lead on circuits in Europe and the Peoples Republic of California has followed. I saw on the history channel that the miltary is looking for lead free bullets at the behest of the greenies so we won't harm our mother earth while killing our fellow man.
How I survived a child hood with both parents smoking two packs a day around us, lead paint, no bicycle helmet, no seat belt, riding in the bed of the truck, BB gun wars, never wearing safety glasses in shop class, swinging in trees like tarzan, emulating Evel Kneivel, Kung Fu, and Bruce Lee, drinking water from the garden hose, DDT at night to kill the skeeters, and saccarin and red dye number 6 in our food, I'll never know. I'm so old that our scientists thought there was going to be a new ice age instead of global warming. Then again, I see a lot of the same ice age guys have come around to the earth is melting in their dotage.
But I digress.
I avoid solder because it has an uncertain bond strength, and can't be relied on as a mechanically strong joint. Crimp (or wire nut) and strain relief.
Matt
