Power Drop Wire

So I am new to N Scale and building my first layout is probably 25 years. I am doing a Hollow Core Door layout downloaded from the internet that suits my plans. I have been laying track and am now ready to start wiring. I am curious, what wire do folks use for power drops. The tTrack group I have joined up with uses 12 gauge stranded with power poles for the bus wire, so I want to maintain that compatability - the drops will need to connect to that. I was thinking of using 22 ga or 20 ga solid for the drops with suitcase connectors, but wonder if stranded is a better option. Any thoughts or input would be appreciated!

Dave

 

This is probably going to sound strange, but I use leftovers from CAT5. I have a lot of it from work. I take one pair out of the bundle and solder to the underside of the rail. Drop it through the tabletop and connect it to the bus wire by soldering.

My years of military aircraft work will never let me use an insulation displacement system on anything I want to rely on. Solder it and be done with it.

The wires are so short on the drops and the number of them is high enough that the relatively small ga is not a problem.

Don

 

I solder 22AWG telephone wire to the rails, then drop and solder it to 12AWG solid copper busses under the layout. The drop is usually 1-3", never more the 5". This has served me well for 30+ years. BTW, all wire were leftovers, the 12AWG from house wiring, and the 22AWG from a 4 foot chunk of 300 pair cable being replaced with buried fiberoptic cable.

BTW, stranded wire is not necessary for DC. Stranded wire is preferred for AC because oscillating current (AC) rides on the surface of a wire. Therefore stranding many small wires provides more surfaces, lowering resistance. However, DC flows through the middle of a wire, so a single large conductor provides a lower resistance for DC than many small conductors. Understand that I'm talking differences in micro-Ohms, but this becomes significant over long distances.

 

"Cat5" phone wire for feeders. "Bell Wire" for buss line. Never had a problem.

.

 

"Skin effect" only becomes appreciable at frequencies well up into the Radio Frequency range (> 1 MHz). At the frequencies we use (DCC), we are well under that so there is no appreciable difference electrically.

 

In my un-educated opinion. Solid is easier to deal with---but an advantage of stranded is that since there are many strand it's less likely to fail if something gets pinched or cut-----now on the flip side, one small strand carrying all the current cause all the rest were cut or broken isn't good either.

Now I hate stranded, but it also seems easier to solder

 

LHS owner suggested using a piece of track under the table for a "buss bar".

Just fasten a length or piece of flex under the board, solder the layout track feeders where required to the track (buss bar) and then connect the power feed to the "buss bar" track. Eliminates the need for exposing pieces of a "buss bar wire" for soldering or connectors. Split of thin piece of plastic tubing down its length and slide it on one rail of the track for short protection isolation.

Sounds simple and clean. Just wondered if anyone uses this method.

 

I wouldn't recommend it. Nickel-silver rail has much higher resistance than copper wire (for similar cross-sectional area). You'll get much better results with copper.

Actually, the older brass and steel rail have lower resistance than nickel-silver rail. The reason that nickel-silver rail is preferred today is that the oxide of nickel-silver is still a conductor, where the oxides of brass and steel are insulators.

This conductive oxide means that you don't have to clean nickel-silver as thoroughly or as often, but it also means that over long distances, you're more dependent on conducting electricity by means other than just the rail.

 

Sounds like he is attempting to retire early.

I like solid for feeders and stranded for bus, but when someone walks up with two 50' rolls of solid for free my decision is made for the home layout. For drops between modules we at the club like the stranded stuff. I find the solid feeders easier to manipulate and hide on the rail.

 

You are setting yous up just like mine. I used solid 22g feeders hooked to 16g stranded bus with suitcase connectors. Works just fine and has been in a running state for 1.5 years. No issues at all.

 

LOL. Actually, he's in his middle 90's. Still pretty active and coherent but does have some health problems.

 

I use the wire from computer and assesory power supplies. It's a lot of work to strip them out but as I have accumulated 10s of them over the years I have more than enough.

 

I use a short 3-4 inch, 20 gauge drop to the rail. I connect a length of 18 gauge lamp cord to that and connect that directly to the panel. Each drop powers a block on my DC layout; no connection is over eight feet. Power to each panel is Romex and that runs up to 20-30 feet. I was just shown to do it this way. It seems to work just fine.

This is a very interesting thread that gives a lot of reasons why we do some things

 

That sounds like he’s trying to sell you more track!

That is just the silliest think I've ever heard of. baffled:


I used #18 doorbell wire on my first N-scale and my O-scale layout and I was very happy with it. I used it because I had whole spool of it. It’s almost gone now.


My last layout is DCC and I don’t have any blocks to worried about so I used a #12 feeder run all the way around with #22 solid phone wire drops. I like the solid wire because it’s easy to solder on to the tracks. They only reason I used the #12 is because I probably have 2 or 3000 ft of the stuff in all colors.


My favorite for DC layout with the track broken up in blocks is 18AWG-7 conductor sprinkler because its color coded for easily identification and it’s wrapped in a jacket to keep them neat. As long the run is not too long, you cut a hole in the jacket and pull a pair out while leaving the others still in the jacket. It has really jumped up in price since I last bought it 15 years ago, well actually now that I think about it, all the copper wire is high.