As you can imagine, those who have aluminum wiring in their homes might want to take a look at updating their system or at least having it inspected regularly. It also expands and contracts more, and it corrodes. Aluminum serves as a good conductor but has a lower ampacity (the point at which the current causes the cable to begin to melt down). However, homes built or remodeled during the ’60s and ’70s used it quite a bit as copper prices skyrocketed. This is because all current electrical wire is made primarily of copper.Īluminum wiring almost never rears its head in residential construction except for larger gauge stranded aluminum wire (larger than #8 AWG). Wire gauge can also, as a matter of simple calculation, tell you the weight of the wire per unit of length. Since we’re talking about electrical wire, for all practical purposes wire gauge determines the amount of electric current it can safely carry, as well as its electrical resistance. In our desire to explain wire in terms of electrical use, however, we’ll deal mostly with a wire’s electrical resistance – more on that later. You can figure that a wire doubles in size every 6 steps in gauge. The term “wire gauge” refers both to how wire is made and the electrical resistance of the wire. The sizes (gauges) range from 0000 (“four aught” the largest) to 40 (the smallest). It’s easy to be confused by wire gauge, especially since, as the number gets lower, the size of the actual wire goes up! AWG stands for American Wire Gauge and is a specification of sorts that gives specific wire dimensions for, among other things, electrical wires.
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