What gauge of wire to use?

Question

I am running about 110 feet of wire to a small shed. What gauge of wire will be able to handle the load with a 30 amp breaker devoted to the shed? I have an air compressor, skill saw, router, miter saw, lights, etc.

Answer 1

I'd probably go with 10/2

Answer 2

Are you putting in a breaker panel in the shed? If not, you CANNOT have a 30A breaker. Only a 15 or 20A circuit is allowed to feed "normal" receptacles etc. A separate building needs a disconnect and grounding. There is more to this job than the wire size. I suspect you don't know enough about this to do this work. Get an electrician to get power to the shed. If you know basic wiring, you can maybe run the branch circuits in the shed.

Answer 3

You Need an electrician for this one. I ran 12/2 about 100 ft and have very little power. Good for lights but nothing more. I would bet it is 6 or 8 Gauge. 10 will not give you the power you need. Of course copper is through the roof right now too. Good Luck

Answer 4

Use 6/2/G UF copper or 4/4/6 aluminum URD, both can be direct buried. The 4/4/6 is about a fourth the cost of the copper wire. Good luck

Answer 5

I found this link to a site that has a table of current ratings for wire sizes. It also has a load calculator. In case the link doesn't work, you can find it by doing a yahoo search with key words......wire+"current rating"

Given the distance and load requirements, I'm guessing you will need a minimum of 6 ought wire.

http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm

Answer 6

Have a look at
http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm
You don't want to lose more than 10 Volts along those 110 feet at a max. load of 30 Amp. So your total cable resistance should not be more than 0.33 Ohm (to-and-fro, so 0.16 Ohm per wire).
Then a AWG12 will do.