#ampacity — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ampacity, aggregated by home.social.
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"Sorry, but there's no way that that cable is rated to safely carry 300 amps."
"How do you know that?"
"Well, for one thing, I can bend it."
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Reconductoring: Building Tomorrow’s Grid Today - What happens when you build the largest machine in the world, but it’s still not b... - https://hackaday.com/2025/06/11/reconductoring-building-tomorrows-grid-today/ #infrastructure #engineering #originalart #trapezoidal #conductor #aluminum #ampacity #capacity #acsr #grid
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Split over 2 pairs, it's 2.5A per conductor. Assuming 75C-rated insulation, you need ~25 AWG - call it 24 gauge for a little safety margin. That's a conductor with cross-sectional area of 0.2mm^2, diameter a touch over half a millimeter.
It's not a human hair - but it does intuitively feel like too much.
We'll probably get used to it. And only see houses go up in flames once in a while because some cheap non-UL-rated cable got purchased from a shady dealer...
(I know Matt doesn't need to be told any of this, it's just for the thread...)
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Oh, and a wire rated to carry that many amps from the electrical utility to your home will need a cross-sectional area of two million circular mils of pure copper.
Yes, it's a crazy traditional unit. In more modern terms, it's over a thousand square millimeters. Good luck!