I recently had someone tell me that they've been told that it's an NEC requirement to keep the conductors of a multi-conductor cable (like MC) twisted together within a panel because of 300.20. Please stop the insanity. BTW I hate the wording of this section.hmy:
Has anyone else heard of people enforcing this?
:lol:
:happyno::thumbsup:
They should not have added the words that I show in bold, but I don't see any way that those words do not require that the conductors be grouped together within an enclosure.
Given iwire's post #24 that is one of the most rediculous things I have ever heard you say and I have tremendous respect for you. How can this be?
And if they are in the same enclosure they are grouped. Nowhere in the common understanding of the word grouped, or in the electrical understanding, is there any implication that the conductors have to be touching each other.
No it doesn't. A few dunke-offs in NJ may need a forceful talking to, but the rest of the world is getting along just fine. Not just NJ actually, there is always an inspector or code instructor out there somewhere that wants to stroke his ego by coming up with the secret message in the NEC that no one else knows about.
Well it is an issue of what "grouped" means. Inside a panel where it is physically impossible to keep them in close proximity it is obvious to the thinking person that they don't mean kept tightly together. I would be far more concerned with a niggling interpretation in a gutter for example. Common sense tells me that as long as the outgoing and return conductors for a current path are not separated by metal, then it would take extraordinary circumstances like very high frequency to cause heating of surrounding metal. I guess if an inspector actually tried to force you to bundle them together, you could just get a cheap IR gun and prove that the surrounding metal isn't getting hot. That would "prove" that the "grouping" was sufficient.
I also have respect for Don, and I agree with what Don said: the conductors do have to be grouped within an enclosure. At issue is the meaning of "grouped." As others have also said, I don't interpret "grouped" as meaning "touching or twisted together." I say they are "grouped" if they enter the enclosure from the same conduit, and either they are terminated within the enclosure or they exit the enclosure within the same conduit.
You quoted the first half of what I said, that had to do with this thread topic. I addressed your situation in the second half.
I started to laugh when I saw that word. I presumed that it was an intentional play on sounds. For those who don't get the joke, the correct spelling of the German word is "dummkopf," and it roughly translates to a stupid person, a blockhead. It is pronouced pretty much like "dumke-off," if you pronounce the "u" like the "u" in "duel." That, at least, is what little I remember of the three years that I studied German, a time period that ended in third grade. Don't ask me how long ago that was. :lol:
I learned a little bit of German when I was a kid too, but not in school. It was from watching Hogan's Heroes after school.
Bingo.
