After a cold few days we've gotten another warm spell! The highs this week are in the high 50's mid 60's so I've been spending afternoons at the hangar. I got back to the pitot installation yesterday, but with people dropping by the hangar and having to drive up to B&C specialty for some black # 12 wire so that I can have a properly color coded ground wire, it's taken a couple of days to knock this out. Note- the chart in 43.13 indicated to me that based on my estimated wire length I was going to be okay using 14 gauge wire for the pitot heater. But that was just an estimate. I didn't know exactly where I was going to ground it, and the ground leg will adds to the overall length, so I went with the nuclear option and bumped up to a #12 wire. I'll be the first to admit that's probably overkill, but that heater pulls more amps than just about anything else on the whole plane, and it gives me flexibility on how I wire it. Anyway, I pulled the pitot and aoa lines and the pitot heater power wire from the cabin to where they terminate in the wings, and did a mock up of the aluminum lines coming off the pitot tube to see if I might need to trim anything off. As shipped, the aluminum lines off the pitot tube are pretty long and you can cut several inches off of them before you get to the minimum length that Garmin recommends before transitioning to nylon. I don't remember the specific numbers off hand, but they're in the manual. I ended up cutting 2" off the lines to make them terminate in the middle of the wing bay, flared them and added fittings on the bench. All of that stuff will fit up through the pitot mast so you don't have to try to work on that stuff up inside the wing. I made the electrical connections via knife splices covered in heat shrink. The way Garmin does this, if you're using this pitot tube in a 24 volt system you wire the hearing elements in series, and for a 12v system you wire them in parallel. This means you have 2 wires that look to be approx 18 gauge coming into one connector from the heater, connecting to one wire on the ship side (times 2) There are several ways to accomplish this, but you can see in one of the pictures below that I used blue knife splices. Blues are typically used for 14-16 gauge wire, but the two smaller wires coming off the pitot nicely and it also surprisingly fit the 12 gauge wire coming from the ship side. I was planning to ground this locally, but it was getting pretty crowded in that bay, so I ended up running it out the wing tip where I'll ground it to a common ground with the landing lights. The way Garmin does this, if you're using this pitot tube in a 24 volt system you wire the hearing elements in series, and for a 12v system you wire them in parallel