Don Bruder said:
So you've now moved from trying to put two coils on your car or
jump-start it with a welder, to trying to burn your house down by
improper use of extension cords with electric heaters...
Dude, you're a disaster looking for a place to happen. There's only
possible thing to say about you: You're fucking NUTS! I take that
back... maybe there are two things: You're a troll, and a particularly
inept one.
Investigation/exploration/experimentation is one thing, but the crap
you're pulling outta your ass is neither. It's sheer stupid in action,
and quite likely to get somebody killed. I'll look for you on the Darwin
Awards. Hopefully, your award will come soon, before you kill an
innocent bystander with yet another of your half-baked, hare-brinaed
ideas.
An extension cord for a heater is 'half-baked, hare brinaed'? Thats harsh.
Its something that alot of folks would try to do. The fact that he is asking
is a good sign, and allows the folks who really understand this stuff (not
me, unfortunately) to weigh in.
I'm a bit confused by this too. If you double the length of your wire, you
double the resistance (since R = rho * length/cross sectional area). Since
rho is fixed for copper at 10.4, and the area for a given mil (probably #16)
is fixed, R is proportional to length.
Because of this, and the fact that power dissipated by a wire is I^2R, the
power dissipated is proportional to the length.
I would guess that the ability of a wire to dissipate heat is also dependent
on the length, since its almost certainly proportional to the surface area
of the wire. However, this is where I'm probably wrong. Its probably the
case that much of the heat is dissipated by connections to the ends, and
consequently, while heat generation is constant along the length of the
cord, the heat dissipation is non-linear wrt length...
However, without proper knoweledge of the mechanisms behind heat dissipation
in power cords, I would simply rely on a pre-built cord that was designed to
handle 1500W. The following article has some interesting facts.
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/16.html
Here is a fairly cheap cord that will work properly, I think:
<
http://tools.mainseek.com/333R16P789K9-Coleman-Cable-02509-100'-12/3-SJTW-O
range-Extension-Cord.html>
Regards,
Bob Monsen