is 12 gauge wire fat enough for my trolling motor?

[John_S]

Re: is 12 gauge wire fat enough for my trolling motor?

I think you are getting Electrical Code mixed up with basic physics. Yes, there are rules how you wire your house with size and type of wiring for a given load and voltage but the physics stays the same if you are talking 12V, 24V or 110V or any voltage.

I was talking electrical code, and with the last statement, specific to DC. Initially during this discussion we were talking about why it was not an accepted practice to run two smaller gauge vs one larger.

As far as the physics and how the current will travel, yes that stays the same.

 

[EricKit]

Re: is 12 gauge wire fat enough for my trolling motor?

About current direction: Just read about holes, the motion of a positive ion created from the lack of an electron in semiconductors. These holes flow as electrons fill holes and leave empty ones..... and the holes have a mass!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor#Holes:_electron_absence_as_a_charge_carrier

But about the two wires method and the argument one wire will get worse and worse:

If both wires had equal resistance, no problem, they degrade equally.
If one wire is worse than the other, has more resistance, it will have less than half % of the electricity flowing through it. This will cause the better higher load wire to wear faster. As it wears it will begin giving back some of it's % to the original worse off wire as it wears to the same amount of degredation as the original worse off wire. It seems to me the nature of parallel resistors naturally forces the wires to degrade evenly. If one wire wanted to heat up, since it increases in resistance, it would off-load a % to the other wire due to an increase in resistance instead of heating up much.

I seriously doubt wire degredation is any issue in that and just the connections are as bruceb said.

 

[Mark_VTfisherman]

Re: is 12 gauge wire fat enough for my trolling motor?

The point about doubling up wires and having one conductor fail leaving the other overloaded/overheating without tripping the breaker or blowing a fuse should be enough to end this discussion. Wire is relatively cheap, and doing it safely is easy. So we are talking about doubling up wires with the risk of burning down a boat for less money than most people spend on cable TV or satellite TV each month.

Imported John S said it best: "just buy some 8ga and be done with it"