cable sheathing in main panel

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CodeQuandary

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Once upon a time, there were ground bars and neutral bars and all such manner of different locations in a main panel.
Now, taking the Square D Homeline as an example, the neutral/Ground bars are arranged to have connections next to every breaker, also functioning as a snap-on rail for Arc-fault/GFCI.
In the olden days, one would naturally strip the cable sheathing as soon as it entered the panel, since one would then bundle each of the wires off to it's ultimate location.
In this strange new world, if they're all going to the same place, is there any reason not to just leave the cable sheathing on, except for the last 5 inches or whatever? No more looking through 20 white wires to figure out which is the one...
I have seen, as I recall, installers leave little short segments of cable sheathing on the conductors, a few inches apart, which serves the same function...
I admit the aesthetic is a bit repulsive to me, but it seems functional and simple.
 
keep in mind if it is not the service panel the EGC can't land on the neutral bar. With Homeline EGC may not be very far away from some the breakers.

Also consider the extra space the GFCI/AFCI's take up particularly Square D's and how crowded wiring space may become in a typical loadcenter if you still have sheath on cables.
 
with AFCI's and GFCI's you won't need to search through 20 white wires to find the right one, it will be the one landed on same breaker as ungrounded conductor.
 
The code says minimum 1/4 inch of sheathing in the panel, with no mention of a maximum.

I've thought the same thing about leaving the sheathing almost all the way to the breaker, but I can't bring myself to do it. It's just not aesthetically pleasing.

I group the wires going to the breaker. Whether 240v or afci / gfci, all the wires landing on that breaker get loosely twisted together
 

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Interesting! Thanks everyone! The Homeline "Plug-on Neutral" is really what's driving the question for me. All wires are going to almost exactly the same place: L1, L2 in the case of 2-pole, N, & G... same place. Why not leave them in their cable? One could do something fancy like leaving little pieces of sheathing (vs. the entire sheath), but what does that accomplish? Heat dissipation? Really? I'm getting curious about how a code-official will feel about it...
I am in fact a code official, and I think I would be okay with it, I don't yet see why not. Change my mind. Meanwhile, thanks for your thoughts.
 
I will note that I haven't carefully thought about how the wiring with plug-on neutrals "fits" compared to other brands/approaches & the space available in the panel: the plug-on neutral makes for a very clean and simple appearance... are those AFCIs much bigger than other brands? I think that's the implication above. I don't know.
The implication above is that a single-destination cable inside the panel takes more space than a bunch of loose wires. I'm not sure if that's true, nor do I have any guess about how installer variability fits in to that picture.
I'm trying to think about a wiring method (leaving the sheathing on) in a relatively technology-neutral sense (I'm not inherently attached to Square-Ds Plug-on-Neutral technology, it's just the only single-destination panel wiring I'm familiar with).
 
CodeQuandary said:
huh? I'm talking about the main panel... am I one-beer-too-many to understand something here? The EGC just lands on the ground bar, which is the neutral bar, which is the Plug-on-Neutral bar... yes? Do you do something cleverer than that?
Click to expand...
My apologies. I wire every panel as if it was a sub-panel, or might become one some day.
 
CodeQuandary said:
I will note that I haven't carefully thought about how the wiring with plug-on neutrals "fits" compared to other brands/approaches & the space available in the panel: the plug-on neutral makes for a very clean and simple appearance... are those AFCIs much bigger than other brands? I think that's the implication above. I don't know.
The implication above is that a single-destination cable inside the panel takes more space than a bunch of loose wires. I'm not sure if that's true, nor do I have any guess about how installer variability fits in to that picture.
I'm trying to think about a wiring method (leaving the sheathing on) in a relatively technology-neutral sense (I'm not inherently attached to Square-Ds Plug-on-Neutral technology, it's just the only single-destination panel wiring I'm familiar with).
Click to expand...
I don't know how well it works out either. Might be able to make it look nice and neat, but not really certain if it will be easier, harder or about the same to troubleshoot or add/remove circuits down the road.

Intact cables will take up more cross sectional area than the individual conductors. How neatly a particular installer can arrange them is a different story.
 
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