aluminum wiring vs copper

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ramsy said:
Copper Thieves

They follow commercial solar-array installers in my area. Any outdoor raceway rings the dinner bell.
Copper thieves are like sharks, biting into all raceways, but spit out bad taste of aluminum bones.
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They like cell towers too, when we were upgrading old sites from 24 to 48 volts, most of the grounds up the towers were cut about as high as you could reach!
 
electrofelon said:
You see that on poles a lot too. Seems like a step ladder would be a good investment for these people. They really need some business coaching on investment vs payback 🙃
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Our Copper thieves took a long pole with One handle of the bolt cutters taped to them. Tightened the handles to hold them open, went up, pulled a rope like a set of tree loppers.
they stole SPANS of #6 & #8CWC we had left in the air from decades ago.

we haven’t had much of anything stolen since the price of copper came down. That and we use copper clad steel for substation and pole grounds. Had some try, but they give up when they notice it’s steel.
We are training our thieves that it’s useless wire when they go sell it. When we got this in a few years back we took some to the scrapyards in our area and layed it out on the scale. The guy was pricing it for #1 bright. We then explained what it was and told him to put a magnet on it.
We went into his bought bin and found more copper clad steel. He started putting a magnet on everything...

maybe that’s why they leave us alone now and head to the phone towers and solar jobs...
 
Worked in mines a lot. The cable is all fire retardant and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of terminating TPU, CPE, or Nomex you know why that stuff lasts so long in the mine. And once you get the “hide” off it’s usually extra thick EPR which is no joke either. I go through multiple blades stripping one end of a triplex cable. It’s basically impossible to strip the whole thing and doesn’t burn either.

Well a local guy called asking a mine electrician to come over and help him strip out some cable he got. As soon as the electrician saw it he said no but he knew some guys that could help. Hello county sheriffs office can I help you? I mean even the professional stripping companies avoid the stuff. It’s that bad,
 
Interesting topic.
FWIW, the only situation here (UK) where I have seen aluminium conductors used was on the busbars on the output of high current rectifiers. Talking 10kA+
Most of our business was variable speed drive systems. The control wiring was multi-strand copper, usually 1.0mm2. Somewhere between 18 and 16 AWG. Flexible and easy to work with. Power cabling was also stranded copper sized to suit the rating.
 
Besoeker3 said:
Interesting topic.
FWIW, the only situation here (UK) where I have seen aluminium conductors used was on the busbars on the output of high current rectifiers. Talking 10kA+
Most of our business was variable speed drive systems. The control wiring was multi-strand copper, usually 1.0mm2. Somewhere between 18 and 16 AWG. Flexible and easy to work with. Power cabling was also stranded copper sized to suit the rating.
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Yeah, Aluminum is not good to use on situations where there is a lot of vibration, like motors. Too brittle for that environment.
 
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