A fast electrical education for the home/shop by Technology Connections.

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SwordfishMining
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A fast electrical education for the home/shop by Technology Connections.

Post by SwordfishMining »

Basic safety you can use!

and...
Hey there! Correction time (and more thoughts!): THHN wire is what’s inside the sheathing of Romex, which is actually classified as NM-B cable/wire. As in, the conducting wires are THHN, the whole thing together is an NM-B cable. Yep. So there’s that.

Also, I want to be clear that of the problems we have, this isn’t a huge one. Generally, when things get hot because of overloading, it’s at the connection point and not in the wire. For instance, a lot of electrical fires start at the plug/socket interface either because the connection is poor, there could be corrosion, etc. And sometimes they can happen when nothing is overloaded! This is one of the circumstances in which arc-fault circuit interrupters can save lives. It may well be the case that very few fires are started because of the problem we’re discussing in this video. Especially since outside of certain high-draw devices, the risk of overloading the actual conducting wire is low in the first place. That’s why I am comfortable using them!

That said, I remain perplexed that this is an issue we’ve let persist. Most electrical fires aren’t the result of a single thing; they’re a cascade of individually not-great circumstances combining to make a bad situation. In order to reduce the risk of fires, we’ve continually been making the not-great things less bad. That way an increasingly large number of bad circumstances have to align for a fire to happen. Simply put, I think allowing unfused 16 gauge extension cords into the market is a potentially bad link in the chain that we could probably do with cutting out.

In fairness, it used to be much worse. 18 gauge (maybe even 20 gauge) extension cords were available many years ago, but we at least had the sense to make 16 the minimum as time went on. However, as I hope I’ve demonstrated here, that can still be problematic. Pulling 20 amps through that cord made it get very hot quite quickly.
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