At 04:51 PM 11/20/2006, Donald Chester wrote:
> >I notice, by the way, that companies like Superior Essex (who make a lot of
> >wire) have notices saying that the increased price of copper is making a
> >lot of buyers move to aluminum, which is resulting in a shortage of the
> >aluminum rods used for drawing into wire(!).
>
>Which, unfortunately, is going to result in a lot of house fires. I wuldn't
>allow that stuff through the door of my house.
It may well be that aluminum house wiring was easy to improperly
install back in the 70s when it was popular, but that's a specific
application. And, while there are significant numbers of house fires
traced back to the use of aluminum wiring, there's also hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of houses with aluminum wiring that have
not burned to the ground.
Choose what you like, but most feeders and distribution is done with
aluminum conductors. It's all a matter of proper installation and connectors.
Granted, that's the larger sizes.
For smaller sizes, aluminum works nicely in loudspeakers (reduces
moving mass, which improves performance) and in electric motors (less
mass in the rotor).
My airplane used aluminum battery cables, presumably because of mass savings.
Presumably, it's mostly a matter of proper application
And, of course, for antennas, aluminum seems to work pretty well for
the antenna itself, and might have real promise for radial fields,
where "lots of wire" is the desirable feature, probably more than
"high conductivity wire".
Jim, W6RMK
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