hungry1 said:
Sorry if I offended anyone, with my questions, I am trying to help people
get electric to their homes in my area with a generator that outputs
200amps.We can get single 0 copper wire where we are. but the information
that I need is NOT available to my knowledge.
OK, with THAT information provided -
0 AWG copper wire is rated to at least 195 A for about any type
in common use, so it has sufficient capacity. You wouldn't
want to run all 10 homes "in series" anyway, as there would be
excessive drop in the wire and - well, this just isn't the most
efficient way to do this. The best thing to do would be to
run individual lines from the generator to each home, but that is
rarely practical. Most likely, your best bet would be to place the
generator so that it is as centrally-located as possible,
and then run branches from there to groups of homes or individual
homes as needed - in short, try to spread the total load, and distance,
as evenly as you can among several branches. If you have to have
one or more homes signficantly farther away from the generator than
others, try to minimize the load on that branch - in other words, you
can trade the load in any given branch for the length of that branch,
so that no one sees an excessive drop. Single branches to each
home, if they're all going to be limited to 20A each, could do with
wire a good deal smaller than 0 AWG, even if each branch were
700' long. 2 AWG would be acceptable for a run that long, for
instance, and smaller sizes would be similarly acceptable for
shorter distances (you could drop down to 4 AWG all around
if the generator were centrally located within a 700' overall
circle, such that no load were farther away than 350', and
you'd still see <= a 2% drop). (These figures are for copper
wire only - if you were using aluminum, which has other problems,
you'd need larger wire in all cases. All of this information, by the
way, is pretty widely available on the web.)
Having said that...20A/home (assuming we're talking about 220
or 240 V service, a bit over 2 kW) isn't a whole lot by most
standards, but I would certainly admit that it's better than no
electricity at all. You would want to provide breakers at both the
generator and at the individual homes, of course. And PLEASE note
that even if this is a "different country from the USA" - there ARE
still such things as electrical building and safety codes, and they
exist for a very good reason. Electricity can be very dangerous
stuff, and is not to be played around with. If you don't have access
to such basic information as the current capacity of copper wire,
then I would have to question whether or not you have sufficient
expertise to do what you are proposing properly and safely. It
IS nice to be able to have electric lights and such, but it's far more
important that no one gets killed or has their home burned down
in the process of getting those things. In short, I'd have to
strongly advise against trying to install this sort of system yourself
unless you can get some expert assistance.
Bob M.
