. . . or wire in free air, or buried, depending on what table you look at.
As as gut feel, I would say that 3 inches of 26AWG would have a very low temperature rise at 500mA, but as John stated, it's best to run a test. _______________________________________________________________________________ Ralph McDiarmid | Schneider Electric | Solar Business | CANADA | Regulatory Compliance Engineering From: IBM Ken <ibm...@gmail.com> To: EMC-PSTC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG, Date: 09/04/2013 02:26 PM Subject: Re: [PSES] Wire ampacities - Ampacity charts (particularly in the NEC) may assume wire pulled in conduit, more than one current-carrying conductor, etc. You may be better off using a chart from your product Standard (60950 has something to say on this topic but it's a bit conservative). In your case, I would approach the agency with some thermal testing showing that you haven't exceeeded the insulation's temperature rating (assuming it has one) in the application and you continue to pass all the other requirements of your product standard. If it's not a ground wire I think they would be OK with this approach and some limited testing. -Ken On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:15 PM, McInturff, Gary < gary.mcintu...@esterline.com> wrote: I was just discussing the current handling capabilities of appliance wiring material and while I have a chart it is of unknown heritage and differs from some other reference material. For example the chart I have says 26AWG wire can handle about 0.25 amps, but when I look at the connector it says about 1 amp with a 26 AWG wire. I made a search for the NEC amperages but they I could find anything smaller (larger?) about 18 guage and it was primarily for power wiring. Can anybody give me a good reference for AWM current handling capabilities? The UL web-site seems pretty useless as well. Heck I think I talked one of their engineers out of the chart I have. My original supposition was that the wire insulation rating would be exceeded if X amps were run through Y gauge wire, and that was from a safety perspective the upper limit of current. I realized that impedance per/foot has implications on voltage drop etc, but in this case those things are moot. I just want to run 0.5 amps down a 26 AWG wire for about 3 inches at low frequency without overheating the insulation. Again one reference holds about ¼ amp, while another says 1 amp. . Gary McInturff Reliability/Compliance Engineer Esterline Interface Technologies Featuring ADVANCED INPUT, GAMESMAN, LRE MEDICAL, and MEMTRON products 600 W. 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