"Doug Miller" wrote in message news:h763ri$5k1

stuff snipped

I squared R losses in *fifty feet* of wire used to power a camera and an
intercom? Good grief. This thing is getting way too complicated, on a
number of fronts. Someone's already telling him to rent a backhoe, for
christ's sake. OP can dig an 8" deep trench 50 feet long in an hour with
a pointy shovel, put in some PVC pipe and be done with it.

Damn straight. You can add to that "way too complicated" list the OP's
question about savings on his electric bill from using AC and a
transformer
vs. DC -- the difference is about as significant as a fart in a hurricane.

I'm not electronics engineer so I couldn't hazard a guess whether I'd be
heating up the ground unnecessarily with DC voltage fall-off so I appreciate
the info people have provided. It just wouldn't be Usenet without "mission
creep." (-: It's how we ended up fighting an 8 year war executing a simple
search warrant for WMD's that should have been over as soon as we exploded
anything that even smelled of a nuke program and poured a couple of cubic
yards of cement down Saddam's tiger hole. "Just sealing up some hazardous
waste, folks!" It's the American Way.

We're not anywhere *near* the totally useless and off-topice comment zone.
That usually appears when the quote nesting is at least this deep
and is almost certainly about some old, unsettled grudgefight than the
current topic. Unfortunately, I'm guessing by using the word "Saddam" we'll
get there sooner than later. Oh well, that's Usenet!

I won't be renting any backhoes, for certain, but I'd like to know if
there's a neater, faster, less-muscle needed way of digging a 50' trench.
I'm betting it's a great job for some local pre-juvenile delinquents and
once I know what it costs to rent a machine to do it, I'll have a better
idea how much I should pay said underage labor. (-: As I've said before,
I've never buried anything except a few deceased pets and a fencepost or two
so I need all the information I can gather about digging wire trenches. If
it turns out I do rent a machine, I might end up using it to bury the new
sump pump pipe that's sitting on the back lawn as if Comcast's best had
installed it. (-:

I guess I should ask how cable companies and other big cable buriers get
their cables underground. As I said, with Comcast, I've never actually
*seen* them bury a cable. They just leave them lying across people's lawns
and then, one day, they're gone.

--
Bobby G.