8 AWG current capacity

Jun 15, 2005 22 Replies

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

"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

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

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