{"id":4822,"date":"2015-12-24T16:06:24","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T23:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=4822"},"modified":"2015-12-24T16:06:24","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T23:06:24","slug":"learning-about-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=4822","title":{"rendered":"Learning about power"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you get when an old software geek tries to learn about electricity?\u00a0 The same thing you get when you teach a 5 year old not to put their hands on the red coils on the stove.\u00a0 Experience through interactivity.\u00a0 Today’s lesson:\u00a0 fat wires vs thin wires.<\/p>\n

I’ve been using small gauge wire to connect relays to outlets in my power controller project<\/a>. I did this because I thought I needed thick wire to handle potentially large loads through the outlets.\u00a0 I expected to have multiple lights and possibly multiple water pumps attached to each outlet.\u00a0 Fatter wires are used for larger loads (ever seen thin wires on power poles?).\u00a0 So I chose fat wires to connect the relays and outlets.\u00a0 Wire thickness is measured as a gauge.\u00a0 Fat wires have a smaller gauge, which means thin wires have a higher gauge.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Beats me.\u00a0 That’s just the way it is.<\/p>\n

\"20151222_140023\"<\/a>

This looks safe, doesn’t it?<\/p><\/div>\n

The smaller gauge wires don’t fit in the screw-down holes for the relays on the Sainsmart board<\/a>. I had to trim off some of the wire to make them fit cleanly.\u00a0 But the relays only handle 10A max<\/strong> and the distance between the relays and the outlets is less than 6 inches.\u00a0 I’m running standard 110V from the wall through the relays to the outlets. So how thick do these wires need to be?<\/p>\n

After looking at an online wire capacity char<\/a>t I realized I didn’t need the smaller gauge. I could use the larger 22 gauge wire (remember that larger gauge means thinner wire) for the very short runs between the relays and outlets. This is because if I take an average load per outlet of 6 lights averaging about 75 watts per bulb (remember this is lighting for my aquaponics at the moment) I find I’m only using 450 watts over the 110V power input. Using an online calculator<\/a> I can see I’m only pulling about 4.1 amps<\/strong>. That’s far below the max for the relays and well within the safe limits listed in the Capacity Chart for 22 gauge wire. And this gets better if the lights are switched from high wattage incandescent bulbs to LEDs and CFLs, which most of them are now anyway.<\/p>\n

So now I’ll be able to use thinner wire inside the enclosure, leaving more room for the relays and my custom boards.\u00a0 But more importantly, I won’t have a bunch of frayed wires hanging out of the tie-downs to short out the whole thing.\u00a0 And remember:\u00a0 short-out<\/em> is Latin for frying myself<\/em>, because software guys are a danger themselves, their pets, their families and essentially entire neighborhoods when handling hardware.<\/p>\n

And yet, I’m still doing it.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you get when an old software geek tries to learn about electricity?\u00a0 The same thing you get when you teach a 5 year old not to put their hands on the red coils on the stove.\u00a0 Experience through interactivity.\u00a0 Today’s lesson:\u00a0 fat wires vs thin wires. I’ve been using small gauge wire to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[605,1,8,25,562,565],"tags":[560,601,612,640,39,613],"class_list":{"0":"post-4822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-arduino","7":"category-general","8":"category-hardware","9":"category-holiday-lighting","10":"category-pibox","11":"category-raspberry-pi","12":"tag-amazon","13":"tag-custom-boards","14":"tag-gauge-wire","15":"tag-geek","16":"tag-graphics","17":"tag-thin-wires","18":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe9t8-1fM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4822"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4830,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4822\/revisions\/4830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}