hi there
1. either lengthen the wires, make sure you use some heat shrink on the joins, or replace with longer wires, just make sure you follow what you do.

2. If you don't connect i think it will just tick over, you wont get a lot of smoke, the non-prop smoker runs flat out and give max smoke all the time, but they are really noisy.

My smoker stopped working after about 3 weeks, tried to repair it but no joy, so when the RX13 went up in smoke i replaced it with a RX14 (fitted onto where the smoker was mounted) but fitted heat sinks to the mosfets and ran a CPU fan behind (attached to the back of the battery box) them to cool them and used the smoker plug on the RX14 board to power the fan, the fan starts after the start up sequence has finished, that way it don't sap power straight away from the battery.

Kev