Fat wire for facility (a house)

[klugesmith]

Electricity at home was just off for 58 minutes, as a crew with two lift-bucket trucks fixed a mistake (new transformer was on wrong side of pole) and brought other wiring details into compliance.

First time I noticed the extra-large wires, for underground feed to a neighbor's 1-year-old house.  It's one of about eight houses sharing a recently upsized 50 kVA transformer.

The bare horizontal wires from pole to pole are 6 AWG (13 mm^2) in this whole 65-year-old neighborhood, according to a lineman.  The pick-off for new house goes to short pieces of 00 AWG (67 mm^2), now with swaged instead of screw-tightened connectors.  Those wires feed much bigger insulated wires for the vertical and underground run.  Lineman guessed it's 250 MCM (127 mm^2).  Struck me as a waste of metal, but maybe that's the standard for 200 amp service in buried pipes.

p.s. blue sky is the first we have seen in 3 cloudless weeks, in this part of California.

[Mads Barnkob]

Bare air wires have extremely good heat dissipation characteristics compared to wires under ground.

Putting down larger gauges could to prepare for removing the over head wires, as we have in almost all of Denmark, all residential power is through the ground now. The power consumption in 2020 is somewhat different from 65 years ago

[johnf]

Kludge
it could also be aluminium conductor wire--you have to go up a few sizes to equal copper
I have just completed two runs of 4 core 2-0 cable that's sq70mm per conductor to get 60 amps per phase @230 volts to my barn and then on to the new house.
Picture shows the barn switchboard that then feeds the house total run to house =210 meters