Brown, orange, yellow, or brown purple yellow?

zappy

zappy

Senior Member
Location
CA.
When do you use brown orange yellow? And when do you use brown purple yellow? Thank you for your help.
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
Usually it’s Yellow Brown Purple, but either can be used as long as it’s consistent throughout the building. Most everyone uses Brown Orange Yellow for 480/277, but it is not required. But I hear Yellow Brown Purple is still common in Texas. Purple is not common anymore due to it being hard to distinguish between brown in low light conditions.
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
augie47 said:
Locally it's Brown, Purple , Yellow.
Our largest municipality has a local rule restricting Orange to High-Leg.
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I had a job adding a 480 volt service to a building and used Yellow Brown Purple because I was re-feeding the old delta service that I used Black Orange Blue. The Fulton county inspector would not pass me until I changed it to Brown Orange Yellow. His reasoning was that because the other color code was common, an electrician coming in behind me would get confused.
 
kwired

kwired

Electron manager
Location
NE Nebraska
Per NEC alone it is basically your choice if you are designing it. If adding to something existing you need to use the already established scheme.

Some localities do have their own rules on this though.
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
There is an old Walmart in Covington Georgia, that everything is Black Red Blue, 120,208,277 and 480. For some reason that company could not complete that job! They had cases of 1/2” chase nipples for the floresent strip lights that were end to end. LOL!
 
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Birken Vogt

Senior Member
Location
Grass Valley, Ca
Always been BOY here, never seen it the other way ever. But I have seen reference to it. The OP says BPY but I always thought it was BYP. Post 2 is YBP. Which is it really? I guess it sounds like an older color code.
 
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Carultch

Senior Member
Location
Massachusetts
zappy said:
When do you use brown orange yellow? And when do you use brown purple yellow? Thank you for your help.
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The industry norm is to use brown/orange/yellow, unless a local standard governs otherwise. The NEC doesn't enforce this standard, but it's the norm people follow. Some local jurisdictions strictly limit orange to the high leg, and thus violet is used for the B phase of a 277/480V system. Chances are, it really isn't necessary to avoid orange if the AHJ allows it, because if you have a 277/480V service, it's very unlikely to have a high leg anywhere on the property. Most big ticket loads would use the 277/480V system anyway.

What we really need, is a standard for indicating voltage systems that are non-standard for the USA, such as 230/400V or 347/600V. A lot of people default to brown/orange/yellow, for anything other than 120/208V or 120/240V. One way you could do it, is to use all black wire, with the number of tape bands to tell apart phases. Such as 1-band violet for Phase A, 2-band violet for phase B, and 3-band violet for phase C. Another way, is to use light blue and pink tape, such that it is violet/pink/light blue.
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
Birken Vogt said:
Always been BOY here, never seen it the other way ever. But I have seen reference to it. The OP says BPY but I always thought it was BYP. Post 2 is YBP. Which is it really? I guess it sounds like an older color code.
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It is an older one, there is a saying to remember the sequence, but is not really politically correct to say on here. Don’t know why it was flipped around when the newer color code came out, maybe because “BOY” was easy to remember.
 
augie47

augie47

Moderator
Staff member
Location
Tennessee
Occupation
State Electrical Inspector (Retired)
The "purple rule" was enacted here it was not uncommon for our industrial plants which had 480 systems to add a 240 high-leg system.
Since most of them used color coding to meet the requirements of 210.5, the requirement for high-leg to be orange caused conflicted with orange having been used with the 480 system.
 
tortuga

tortuga

Code Historian
Location
Oregon
Occupation
Electrical Design
augie47 said:
Since most of them used color coding to meet the requirements of 210.5, the requirement for high-leg to be orange caused conflicted with orange having been used with the 480 system.
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Thats interesting I think of it as unique sets not unique individual colors. If you just go by individual colors you run out of colors really quick.
hillbilly1 said:
There is an old Walmart in Covington Georgia, that everything is Black Red Blue, 120,208,277 and 480.
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There is a few industrial sites here like that where the voltage is tagged or marked on enclosures, color is only used to indicate phase.
Think about it what are you going to do if you have a long lineup of system voltages like
120/240 (single phase),
240/120,
240Y/139,
208Y/120,
416Y/240,
480Y/277,
600Y/347
and 4160Y/2400.
I have even worked on a building with a 50hz buss for some German equipment.
 
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