Eigenvector wrote:
SNIP


A lot of people are firing back claiming the wire can handle 65 A, 60 A,
2000A, whatever, those current carrying capacities aren't advertised on the
wire bundle, so how would an electrician know that? I'm presuming an
electrician isn't schooled at the same level as an Electrical Engineer. So
looking at a wire and being able to tell the ampacity of it seems liberal to
me. When they allow higher breaker sizes it also tells me that the NEC
conventions are largely anecdotal or arbitrary as opposed to calculated or
theoretical values - which is even more worrisome to me. I would expect
them to state restrictions and rules more along the lines of "This is the
theoretical limit of this particular wire, plus a safety margin of 1.5 - you
may not use something higher than this value" Rather than, "Just use the
next highest one, they don't make the correct one for it." If they were to
state something like that, I would also expect them to qualify it by stating
the reason why they make that allowance. Like I said, just me asking
questions.



Indeed, electricians are required to know all those fine details.

To get some feel for the breadth of Code issues, look at Mike Holt's
pages which include a very busy forum on Code issues:
http://www.mikeholt.com/Newsletters/Newsletters.htm

Jim