On Jun 22, 9:18*am, Pavel314 wrote:
This is a theoretical electrical question, not something I actually
plan to do. Say somebody wants to run a new circuit from the breaker
box to one special outlet, like for a microwave oven or window air
conditioner or something like that. Being an ecconomical sort, this
guy decides that instead of buying the proper gauge wire for the job,
he'll use up some 14 gauge wire which is lying around from a previous
job, but run two hot lines and two ground lines in parallel, as
diagrammed below.

Box: Hot ====================
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *Load Outlet
Box: Ground==================

So we have two black 14g wires running from the hot connector on the
breaker to the outlet and two white 14g wires running back from the
outlet to the ground in the box. Two questions:

1. What gauge single wire would this be equivalent to in current
carrying capacity? That is, would this be the same as running a single
10g or 8g or what? Maybe 14g / 2 = 7g?

2. This seems to be very unsafe but I'm not sure why. It's probably
against every wiring code everywhere. What's the danger with this set
up?

Again, I'm not going to do this, I'm actually going to go out and buy
the proper gauge wire for my project, but this popped into my head and
I wondered what the rest of you thought about it.

Paul

The danger would be that one half of the circuit could fail and the
remaining half would be overloaded.

In your example it's probably ok to run a microwave on a 15amp circuit
with a single piece of 14/2. But I would run 12/2 on a 20 amp
myself. A dryer would be a better example.