Must be better out there?

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Why me

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Mar 29, 2004
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announce1 Hi guys your pain in the butt again but what to hell all my trainning tells me there must be a better wire than using 2.5twin for bus wire or even 4.5 there must be a very fine 6 core cable that can draw 20 amp out there this would make life lot easier than farting about with all thease wires for power ie bus lighting points ect .mike:wave: :thumb:
 
Mike,

What in the world are you doing that you need 20 amp circuits for? A 20 amp circuit would require at least 12 ga wire, six conductor 12 ga cable is going to be around 1/2" in diameter. Did you mean 2 amps? 18 awg would work for that but neither qualify as "very fine" wire. You'll have to do you own conversions in any case.:rolleyes:
 
Hi don my lenz is being upgraded to 10amp transformer i will need to belt and braces somthing on the lines of max 15amp buss wire to carry power just in cas was wondering why i need such heavy cable when there must be some real nice fine cable that will carry that ampage still can only hope i guess.mike
 
Sorry Mike, if you're going to size for that kind of amperage, than there are rules you must follow. You can get by with 14 ga for 15 amps. Using smaller wire would be dangerous because the smaller the wire the more it's going to heat up when you draw those kinds of amps, plus you'll get voltage drops in the wire, that's why it heats up. You could cause a fire if you under rate your wire.
 
Hi don fully agree with you was just thinking all this modern stuff space shuttle ect must be high current used and only small cable used was thinking to hard again story of life like things to easy rolflmao.mike
 
I like solid wire for buss, and mall stranded for drops. I think your Lenz dcc may carry 10 amps on the buss for multiple trains, I doubt if it will carry that much load for any one train unless you are doing a light power move with 12 locomotives or more! If you need to do the light power move, I would limit it to 6 locos at a time. I noticed at Lowe's home center yesterday that 14/2 romex was $10.00 for 25 feet. I like romex because it is easy to take the wires out of the shielding, and it is solid wire that is inexpensive for buss wires. I don't know if they sell anything similar in the U.K.
 
Mike,

Even in outer space they have to obey the laws of physics. You may be thinking of control cable. This can be a small cable used to send control signals, but the wire that carries the power to the device that's being controled has the same requirments there as here.

Good luck,
 
well you could use smaller pure silver wires(silver has a lower ohms per meter than copper)
might be a bit expensive tho
even better use superconductors
(altho even more mega expensive)
and the liquid nirogen(?) they use might be a bit awkward as well

techology can do many things- but `everyone' has to obey the laws of physics
there aint no way round that im afraid
 
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