8 AWG current capacity

It's a standard Canadian wire designation, suitable for use in wet locations. Most service entrance conductors here are RW90 insulated.

Ideally you could sell the single conductor #8 or trade it in for some larger cable. Unfortunately it's not a very useful or sought after item.

With the number of colors you have you'd be limited to 120 Volt circuits, unless you have lots of the black. It takes 4 conductors to do a standard 120/240 subfeed. Parallel runs in this gauge is not acceptable. The feeding breakers are not designed to hold 2 wires anyway. As others have pointed out the voltage drop at this distance will probably limit you to 15-20 amps total load at your shop with the #8.

For this application I would probably recommend #2 TECK breakered at 60 amps, or 1/0 ACWU. These are both armored direct bury cables. That should be enough to run a medium size welder and lights, etc. (again I've given Canadian cable designations)

Mike

Reply to
Mike S.
Loading thread data ...

"lionslair at consolidated dot net" wrote in message news:42b0f9b7$1 snipped-for-privacy@spool9-west.superfeed.net...

As far as I know, the only difference between PVC schd 40 electrical conduit and PVC schd 40 water pipe is the color and the labeling. I don't use thin wall PVC for anything.

Vaughn

Reply to
Vaughn

You could always run two circuits rather than one circuit with paralleled conductors. If I did that, I would run two 240 volt circuits and put the lighting on one of them. Trying to balance the 120 volt loads so there is not a lot of current in the neutral. That way if you pop the circuit breaker from a heavy tool load you won't be in the dark.

The voltage drop is something you can compensate for with a buck boost transformer. It is somewhat of a problem with loads that vary. I would use circuit breakers sized to protect the wiring and if you want to guard against low voltage use a panel in you shop with smaller breakers.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.