I know what you’re sayin but AWG doesn’t use fractions. A good equivalent would be like shirt size. Small, medium, large, extra large. It’s just that size wire and that’s the end of it. You don’t need to know the diameter or cross section of conductor or whatever.
And even fractions are more of a feeling for us I guess. If you work with tools you can spot an inch, quarter inch, foot, etc. It really does come down to a “feeling” in a way that’s difficult to put in words.
They’re defined like all American measurements. By “feel” of each size
I’ve been doing electrical work for 11 years and I can feel a 12, 14, 16, or 18 awg wire in my hands and tell you the difference.
I mostly don’t like how there’s no rhyme or reason to the metric equivalent. All the numbers are basically random in order of each other so it’s a crapshoot tryin to say something is one or the other. But again, I don’t use it regularly
I like using metric for measuring with a tape measure. Feels a bit more accurate and easy to remember as you go.
But wire size I think AWG (American wire gauge) is far superior than metric. Easy to remember, 18 16 14 12 or 10 AWG. Compared to metric which just lists the outside diameter. So those same sizes in metric are 1, 1.5, 2.5, 4, 6 mm²
I’m sure if I used it every day it’d be different. And the larger sizes in AWG are kind of a mess. It’s even numbers til 1 AWG, then there’s technically a 0 AWG, then it goes 1/0 to 4/0, then 250 - 1000 MCM (but also some people call it kcmil?)
Still just “feels” right to me after using it for so long
I am extremely focused on industrial electrical work as a career and have done it for about 12 years. To be quite honest, I can’t picture myself ever doing anything else.
As a hobby though, I love working with wood. I’ve been slowly building my new kitchen and enjoying it quite a bit. Woodworking may be in my future. A good friend of mine has a membership to a shop that’s close by
Yeah I have some of the traditional tin snips. These are pretty similar but way more “scissors” like. I’ll probably be grabbing them next time I go to the store
I saw a pair of $40 scissors at the hardware store the other day. These things were like almost the size of my forearm. I have no idea what I’d use them for. I may pick them up next time I go.
Edit: Ok looks like cutting thin steel and plastic stuff like siding. I don’t know when I’ll need this but I know I will at some point.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Malco-1-in-Straight-Cut-Tin-Snip-M12TS/100147753
They make these electrician scissors that I used to have. They’re more meant for cutting cables and stuff. I used them to cut some flat rolled roof material and ruined them but got the job done. These would have been great for that.
Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.
Like most of the US, we had a weeks long cold spell with average temperatures around 5-10° F. It started to really affect my psyche. It was followed by a sprout of really mild winter weather, getting up to 60°. It snowed a bunch last night but it’s supposed to warm back up this week.
I couldn’t even get up my street for most of the cold weather due to a foot of snow that wasn’t melting. So I was parking under a bridge and walking like 5-10 minutes each way thru the woods every time I went to work, which has been 7 day weeks lately.
I finally got some crucial insulating done at my house but there was some bad drafts and stupid shit I found behind the walls of just holes out to nothing. Which the house is right up against a story tall retaining wall so it was almost impossible to see from the outside. There’s like maybe a foot between the wall and the house.
How to with John Wilson is one of the best shows that has a very simple premise. He basically just finds odd things happening around NYC and gives commentary, advice, and self-reflection, and is very funny.
Fair enough
And most of the world runs on 240 or 220v, which is a higher voltage and allows for smaller conductors.
Idk, another factor is the US started their electric grid in the 1800s to the 1940s. It was the first in the world. Hard to stop once something is set as a standard like that. It’s like asking why they used lead and asbestos or built foundations out of stacks of sandstone rocks, all of which applies to my house haha. I’m sure in a few decades people will look back and question our use of plastics.
Heat dissipates easier in open air than in conduit, meaning the conductors can be undersized drastically compared to if they’re in conduit. Ever notice how the wires from the weatherhead are 2/0 awg, and on the poles and to your house (even after the transformer so same operating voltage), are way smaller? More like 12 awg on poles? The cost for the larger wire buried underground would be massive.
Also, as others have said, maintenance is significantly easier.
Yeah that was 11 years ago and I did the field service portion of that job for like a year, I was fresh out of trade school and working as a grunt for GE as a 22 year old. Until GE decided they were gonna move the business to Germany and Japan and shut down the whole factory.
It had its perks, I got a $75 per meal allowance and could put beer on it and shit. I let someone take over my room for the year back home and had basically no living expenses, just stayed in nice hotels in vegas and some rink-a-dink ones in the middle of the desert. It let me pay off all my loans in a year (which were only like $10k from a 9 month trade school thing)
Anyway I stuck with doin heavy industry electrical work for a while. Now I have a much cushier job doing testing, QA, a bit of design work when applicable, and field service for some absolutely massive electrical systems for steel mills. These things push 6-10k amps thru busbar systems we fabricate from scratch, and are all custom. I do work a lot of OT still but I have a way better work / life balance now
18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.
Probably only a couple hours per day.
I’m an industrial electrician and it’s all hands on minus some random testing on a laptop sometimes, but I don’t do much of that.
At home I can’t even play vidya games for more than a couple hours. I need to get up and clean or cook or read a book or do something.
I’ll watch some movies or anime if I really wanna go couch potato mode though
Probably a little different than what you’re describing but I’m reading blood meridian right now and it’s very good. It’s about a 14-year-old runaway in 1850s America where everything is fucked. He gets in increasingly desperate and violent situations to try and survive
It’s all good man, stay safe out there.
He already replied to you saying his job is dangerous. He said he’s around hot and explosive shit all day. I’ve been in power plants and that’s the example I gave that some of them are not fucking safe. We built panels for this nuke plant and the guy was telling me you can’t touch some of the handrails because you’ll get shocked .
Really don’t care about how you feel about it because I’ve seen it with my eyes.
Weird hill to die on
I agree with your sentiment but it’s absurd to tell OP that his job is “very safe”. Until you’ve seen what heavy industry is really like, I’d refrain from commenting on it. I’m an industrial electrician and I’ve worked in steel mills, foundries, factories, power plants, etc.
It can truly be the wild west out there. Operators have a tough job in often sketchy situations, heavy machinery, around nasty chemicals and fumes and just the dirtiest grime. Mills fucking suck for example. We’ve been working on the Oswego plant in upstate New York which is the largest supplier of aluminum for Ford. It burned down, twice. There was a giant ass hole in the roof from the fire and like 12 feet of water in the basement from all the fire departments spraying where all the electrical equipment is. Then when they were fixing shit, another fire happened from someone welding on the roof.
This is an extreme example, but it is insane how the world works sometimes. I was 22 working on a solar power plant out west and the maintenance guys told me everything was locked out and off. I do a dead check and find 1000v on the busbar from a row of solar panels on some shit I was just about to work on. “Oh yeah that disconnect box is broke, we don’t shut that one off” was the response.
Safety and regulation can only get you so far unfortunately. Safety is always #1 all these places say but you really gotta be on and alert and conscious of what’s going on around you at all times. Injuries can happen in an instant
My favorite was for a job installing cable for some subcontractor for Comcast and there was a bunch of talk about how much money I could make I just had to “hustle” and “get my numbers up” and I could “make my own way as my own contractor”. Red flags all around but I was like 20 and just getting out on my own and before I got serious about doing real electrical work as a career.
Anyway after orientation that included the guy telling us “don’t have sex with any clients this isn’t like those pornos where she bangs the cable guy”, I go out in a van with a dude. He was basically like “listen man this job pays jack shit. If they don’t have enough work for you you’re gonna be sitting in the van making minimum wage. I would honestly plan for your pay to be around that for your first year”
I basically quit on the spot. Got to go up on a telephone pole though, that was cool I guess.