As far as Australian Standards are concerned, cable sizes matter. Now, a website has been created to make cable sizing easy for electricians. Joe Young reports.

Picture yourself on site about to pull a cable. You know selecting a cable too small will cause a series of problems and if the cable is bigger than necessary, it would be a waste of time, effort, money and space. Also on your mind are the consequences of laying a cable not compliant with AS3008, the Standard concerned with cable selection.

It’s enough to make even the most seasoned of sparkies sweat. But, the thought of meticulously thumbing through page after page of the Standard is enough to put anyone to sleep.

The website, www.as3008.com, has been created to assist electrical engineers, technicians and electricians to quickly select and size cables and ensure AS3008 compliance.

Using their smart phone, an electrician can input relevant data into the website and it will instantly create a simple cable selection and sizing report based on the Australian Standard.

If you wanted to know the load capacity of a cable for specific site conditions, you would input the cable’s current, power, phase voltage, power factor, phase rotation and phase and the website would then respond with a graphical report showing phase vector information, current waveforms, power, de-rated current capacity, percentage voltage drop and the thermal stress limit for a particular sized cable.

To calculate impendence, you would input the cable’s metal, core structure, core type, material group, insulation designation and configuration.

For current rating, you would input the cable’s highest ambient temperature, arrangement and the number of circuits.

It will also calculate voltage if you input cable length, max voltage drop, fault current, clearance time, let-through timing and fault current timing.

Andrew Cripps created the website because he wanted to be able to check the calculations he was using in his work as an electrical engineer.

For this reason the website has been designed to help users gain a better understanding of the mathematical underpinnings of the website’s calculations, which is why Andrew includes graphical representation of the data in the reports.

“A lot of electricians have learnt about vectors and the graphs give them a way to play around with the result and get a better understanding of what is going on,” Andrew says.

“Originally I designed it with electrical engineers in mind, for use during the design process; but, after putting the app on a few online forums it has become popular with electricians as an easy way to size cables on site.”

When the website was first built, it had more functionality but Andrew got the feedback that at times it was too complicated to use.

“I’ve redesigned the site so it’s intentionally very simple in its design and function,” Andrew says.

“The most important thing for me is that people who are not familiar with the app should be able to pick it up and get the answers they need within a minute. There’s no need for training to know how to use it.”

And best of all, unlike the AS3008 document it’s free.

Of course, there are sparkies out there would will prefer to size cables the old fashion way, which is a bit like using the street directory instead of Google Maps. For them, the site can still be helpful as a reference to know where to look in the AS3008 document.