Most amusing: wire loss depends on insulation color

According to the article, the installation would not be to code. You can't use a conductor marked as ground for anything else.

Cheers

Raises an interesting question though: what is the loss tangent of the various pigments used to color cables? It's a very small contribution since little is used (maybe smaller than the manufacturing variation in the PVC itself), but I'll bet it's still something.

Tim

-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website:

Tim Shoppa a écrit :

But read all the story... and 2 paragraphs lower:

Left, 2.5 mm2 power cable normally used for solar power; right, 16 mm2 power cable. Solar power vendors typically won't tolerate energy losses greater than

3% from power cables. With our tenfold increase in thickness to 16 mm2 energy loss drops to 2.6% which amounts to 6.8 Watts for the current that this cable carries.

It seems that they only had the heavy gauge in yellow-green.

--
Thanks,
Fred.

I don't really pretend to be able to comment about European building or electrical codes. Keep in mind the typical writer of a Tom's Hardware article is a teenage techno-nerd - or maybe an older guy who is aspiring to be a teenage techno-nerd, and probably not really up on civil or professional standards. But, well, that's the attitude of Mr. Starbuck Flying, or even a high-end audio guy who cares about the brand or color or direction of his speaker cable.

Even just in the US, I occasionally have internal metal gear-gnashing when I have to transition between "black =3D negative =3D ground (automotive wiring)" to "black =3D hot (120VAC)".

I even once dealt car with positive ground, and that didn't really hurt my brain too much, seeing as how in a 30's vintage car nothing much depends on the polarity other than the direction of the generator spinning has to be congruent to the direction the starter motor whizzes, and if the battery wiring matches too then I was in fat city :-)

Tim.

Yeah, maybe it was just poor phrasing on the author's part. I myself have learned over the years to be very careful that I don't say more than I actually mean, to the point where sometimes I have to go through all the possible incorrect interpretations and say why I don't mean any of them.

But it's easy to see how somebody on the fringe (e.g. Mr. Starbuck Flying) might believe that poor phrasing is the same as cause and effect (e.g. glue in a power supply, or whatever that thread is about.)

Tim.

If it's an outside cable white would keep it marginally cooler in sunlight, hence lower resistance.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

More amusing is how pointless it all is. I hope they have the guts to publish their results.

Assuming it is in Germany I reckon they barely have enough solar cell to power the PC on average and not nearly enough battery to keep it running

24/7.

I reckon they will spend more just on maintenance/replacement of their inadequate battery than the cost of the power they generate (if they keep it running long enough to need a replacement battery).

What does the Bible say about wire color codes?

John

Or black (at least in the IR) would let it radiate heat better.

Hey, another money-maker: speaker cables with heatsink fins. That would look great next to my hardline RCA interconnects and AC power bussbars.

John

The point will be to demonstrate that solar is darned expensive, but is a perfectly viable option if you think it's worth it (clearly most people wouldn't :-) ).

They have 2x130W=260W panels, and say the PC draws ~60W, so while I'd agree that operating 24/7 is probably borderline (particularly in winter), for working, say, 8 hours a day I think they have a reasonably sized system.

Oh, absolutely -- at least today, producing your own electricity via solar is almost always noticeably more expensive than buying it from the power company. Most individuals with large solar installations have done so either because grid power just isn't available or because they're figuring solar is more environmentally friendly than oil usage (which arguably it can be, but depends largely on how much value you assign to keeping oil in the ground for future generations... and nukes are even better yet...).

---Joel

Even better, silver cable in a tube with cold air pumped through it from a peltier junction

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

But Tim is in PEPCO territory, where green is one of the hot's in 3 phase feeds. [No, I'm NOT making this up..]

--
A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that\'s close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn\'t close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

powered-pc,1693-16.html

I sincerely hope that they meant to say "of the cables that we happened to have on hand, the one that happened to be green-yellow happened to be biggest".

But you never know -- perhaps the color of the insulation affects the crystalline grain structure of the underlying copper? Could the audiophiles be missing out on an important factor in building really good sounding tube amplifiers?

--
www.wescottdesign.com

Try to use a red wire for "ground" and a black one for "plus" : it won't work, because - the law is the law ;-)

I'm sure you meant to say "cold, dry, nitrogen-15 (isotopic purity

99.5% or better)", did you not?

-- Dave Platt AE6EO Friends of Jade Warrior home page:

I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Exodus 39:3 (King James Version)

And they did beat the gold into thin plates, and cut it into wires, to work it in the blue, and in the purple, and in the scarlet, and in the fine linen, with cunning work.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

I was thinking cheap.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

I was thinking "cold, dry, liquified N15", and embedded in the silver are strands of superconductor. As a plus, your speakers can now generate 10T at the voice coils. ;-)

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

Green or green/yellow is not a just a Europeon thing. It's not permitted to use them for other than ground in the US either (cars excepted - who knows what they do or why).

I've never been confused by the black wire. It's a pretty easy exception.

Electronics care too.