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A rep in Kansas City swore the cheap 22 gauge wire would be fine on a 300 foot run, and I told him he was nuts
Tested it myself last month with a multimeter and the voltage drop at the far end was barely 0.4 volts, way better than the 18 gauge I'd been pushing for years. Now I'm wondering how much of my supply budget I've been wasting on overkill, anybody here actually run the math on this for longer pulls?
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oliviabutler22h ago
That "barely 0.4 volts" number is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and that is the part nobody checks. A multimeter with no load on the wire will read almost full voltage at 300 feet no matter what gauge you use, because you are measuring with basically zero current flowing. Put an actual load on it, say a 2 amp camera or whatever, and suddenly that same run drops way more. The wire does not care about the meter, it cares about the amps. Take your reading again with the device plugged in and drawing power, then compare the two gauges, because I bet that gap gets a lot wider than 0.4 volts.
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