Hired an electrician to do a job. He ran out of 12 g stranded wire and I offered some 12 g solid so he could finish instead of running out to the store. He said he only works with stranded and turned down my offer.
Why would an electrician perfere solid or standed in doing a house wiring job???
In his opinion, solid wasn’t an option.( He’d be a perfect fit for the woodshed tavern)
Replies
every sparkie i ever worked with was solid only in anything 6ga & under... to each is own i guess... one guy did tell me in some areas and on some Gov jobs it specs stranded only...
i too would like to know the why
p
we're lazy.........
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., wer ist jetzt der Idiot ?
Stranded wire is significantly easier to pull through conduit. Only reason I know of. It has a very slightly lower resistance, but nothing that makes a difference in house wiring.
Ed
easier to work with. als electron travel on the outside of the strands so resistance is lower than solid..Most hated person on the net
"Skin effect" makes no difference until well above human hearing. Cross-sectional area is what allows a conductor to carry current. The skin may conduct a little faster than the center but where there is copper, there are electrons flowing. You don't work for Monster Cable, do you? lol
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
I love my Monster Cable! The lower resistance of the gold plating lets me hear those 3 megahertz highs without distortion.ROTFLMFAOSamT
Praise the Corporation, for the Corporations' highest concern is the well being of the public.
I effin' HATE Munster Cable! I have a customer with a very nice set of KEF 107 speakers, driven by a B&K preamp and an Audio Research VT-130 power amp. The store in town that used to be the largest Munster Cable whore sold him some crap with stranded conductor for the highs (skin effect, don'tcha know?) and a solid conductor alongside for the bass. According to Munster Cable, the lows and high travel at different speeds so one it twisted more than the other to help the sounds arrive at the same time. What a load of crap! If the speakers were 100K feet away from the amp, maybe it would matter. On top of that, the outer jacket is almost 1/2" dia but when that comes off, the stranded conductors are 16 ga and the solid is smaller than that. I think that stuff goes/went for about $7 per foot.This is like the people who HAVE to have equal length speaker wires, so the sound gets there at the same time. Electricity travels about 1'/nanosecond. It doesn't matter! Equal length cables and if the listener's head moves less than 1" to one side, the improvement is lost.I HATE DEALING WITH AUDIOPILES!. Worse is dealing with high end audio sales people. They think they can hear God in this stuff.Don't get me wrong- I really, really like great sound. What I have a problem with is marketing geniuses creating a market for something that there's already a glut of and bullsh!tting people into thinking that their lives won't amount to squat without this product. Audio Quest sells interconnects with batteries connected (all cable has some capacitance, so the voltage acts like it's "forming" a capacitor) and a 2 meter set lists at $4900.00No, I didn't misplace the decimal.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
I want my stereo's frequency response to go from DC to light.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
lower resistance of the gold plating
Sam, you almost never get anything wrong, but gold is HIGER resistance than copper.
But, but, but, it helps me hear the 3 Megahertz highs. SamT
Praise the Corporation, for the Corporations' highest concern is the well being of the public.
gold is HIGER resistance than copper.Not for audiophiles! If you don't believe me, just ask Monster Cable!Seriously, you're correct. In order of increasing resistance it's silver, copper then gold at a ratio of 1.59:1.673:2.44.I was making fun of Monster cable.The skin effect depth at 20Khz to 30Khz is about 1.3mm (millimeters.) 14 ga wire is 1.63mm dia. So the skin effect at 30khz on 14 ga reaches 4/5 of the way across the wire! From all sides! A thin layer of gold does nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero.If you are going to utilize skin effect, you really want the conductive skin, (silver is slightly better than copper, which itself, is a whole lot better than gold,) to be 5 times the skin depth or about 6.5 mm thick around that 14 ga wire, (at 30khz.) A wire that is 14.6 mm (.58")thick is 000000 (6 ought) guage! HighFives' 16 ga cable is only 1.29mm dia, thinner than the skin effect depth at 30khz. LOLCan you say Godzilla Meets King Kong Cable? ROAR!"Hey Mr. automotive stereo installer. Would you please run 6/0 twisted pair solid silver wires to my speakers?" Bwahahahaha!Most of the current will start flowing thru that (hi resistance) gold plating on Monster Cable at around 3Mhz to 30Mhz.SamT
Praise the Corporation, for the Corporations' highest concern is the well being of the public.
"Not for audiophiles!"If you had been reading my post more accurately, you would have noticed that I typed 'audio PILES', not 'philes'. No typo there.Munster cable is one of the Great Scourges of audio. I thought platinum was the best conductor. Definitely knew that it was silver, copper and then gold, in descending order."HighFives' 16 ga cable is only 1.29mm dia,"Hey, Hey, Hey!!! First of all, it's high figh (hifi was taken when I came up with my e-mail address), not high five and that's not my 16 ga cable, that was Munster's crap. "If you can't impress them with logic, baffle them with BS" definitely applies, when it comes to audio equipment. "The sound is chocolaty", "you should allocate 10% of the system price when you consider what you need for cabling", "you need to run a green magic marker around your CDs because it cleans up the background and tightens up the bass but it's not as good as this stuff" and "I think there's kind of a surface tension thing going on when the laser light hits the surface of the CD and this corrects a lot of that".Those are all things that have been said, to me, about equipment and accessories, other than the green marker, which was in Audio magazine. Surface tension for light? What a load of BS!
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Monster Cable is also a pitbull company with an A-hole at the lead. They have filed hundreds of lawsuits against any number of companies that use Monster in their name - even Disney for Monsters.Inc.Their justification comes from the fact that their patent filing was so broad that it could be construed as covering any type of product you could think of. (Even though their primary business is obviously audio/computer wiring products)Aside from Disney, the real problem is they have sued any number of small companies that have had to go out of business because of the legal fees required to fight Monster Cable's lawyers.Their first contact with a potential "tardemark infringer" is to threaten legal action unless they pay Monster Cable a licensing fee and give them a % of profits for years to come.They are doing this to a small costume internet company with Monster in their name and the owner has documented all of MC's tactics in a website - do a search for MC/lawsuit and you'll come up with a ton of very questionable/un-ethical behavior from MC.I'll never buy another MC product ever again regardless of whether it's good or not.JT
I have used their stuff and it's generally nothing special, but since I have control over what I buy, that's not one of the brands I'll carry. If I want the generic source for the RCA, BNC and F connectors they use, I'll go to their source, F-Conn. One place here in the MKE area was the largest single store dealer for their stuff and they dropped the line. I have no interest in dealing with a company that wants to control the world, one vague rule at a time.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Know any audeophilistines who want to pay big bucks for a quad metal envelope 6L6 tube amp?
I'll even plate the tubes gold so they run lots hotter - that's good isn't it?
lots hotter - that's good isn't itReminded me of a time when I was the tech for a radio station. One of the DJs liked to overdrive the system, thinking it would push the signal father! Anyway she blew three finals one week, the last time both sides at once. Since there were no more spares, I used a well cooked tube that had been laying around for a while. I mean this sucker had turned every color under the rainbow and most of its' surface was BLACK! She blew two more tubes before management came down and told her that if she even thought about overdriving again, she was out. That cooked tube was not one of the two she fried.SamT
Praise the Corporation, for the Corporations' highest concern is the well being of the public.
Did he charge you for his time when he went to the store? If he did, that should answer your question. He wanted a break. Maybe his poor, widdo finders were tired from all of the stripping, bending and twisting of the wires. If he likes the little strands of wire sticking out all over at the ends, fine, but if I have to bend a hook in the end of a wire, solid is a lot cleaner when the strands are smaller.
IIRC 5 amp margin gain...
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Forget the primal scream, just ROAR!!!
It's always hard to look across the internet, and peer into the mind of someone you've never met .....
My first hunch is that you did not hire a real sparky; you hires some maintenance guy who did some electrical on the side. There is, for better or worse, a trade bias in favor of solid wire .... something that has absolutely no basis in any code.
Sparkies like wires in solid form, because you can push them through most sections of pipe; no need for the fish tape. You can also easily wrap the end around a screw- sparkies aren't about to use the push-in connections on receptacles.
Another reason to dislike stranded wire is that it's all too easy for one tiny strand to escape the wire nut- and that little strand will zap you just as much as a big wire!
Maintenance folks like stranded because it pulls easier, is easier to push connections back into the box, and is easier to wire nut together. In places where the wire is flexed a lot ... say, the whip from the disconnect to the motor ... stranded is believed to last longer.
You say he was a 'real' sparky? It's also possible that he did not want to use material from an unknown source - you. I've had folks try to palm off on me all manner of unsuitable stuff; my favorite was the guy who wanted me to use fence rail as conduit!