Tested silicone wires from different sources and different gauge

Hi,
just wanted to share a very simple test I made to check the quality of some new wires I just received. The wires were bought from intl-outdoor and from two different sellers on aliexpress.

For comparison, pure copper resistivity is 1,68*10^–8 ohm*m (of course, my calculations assume the overall wire cross-section is exactly the nominal one… which is probably far from exact)

The test has been made measuring the voltage drop @5A. Of course the voltage measurement points were independent (the voltage clips and the power supply clips were not touching each other). For the smaller wires you have to be quick reading the voltage drop because it rises quickly because of the Joule effect.

Basically… I’ll keep buying the wires wherever it’s cheaper :stuck_out_tongue: don’t get me wrong, intl-outdoor it’s probably one of the best shops around for flashlight, it’s just that from my (limited) experience it’s not worth if all you need are cables… especially if you don’t mind measuring the resistance to check what you get on aliexpress is good (there is definitely consistency in the quality of what you buy from renowned shops such as intl-outdoor, not necessarily so on random aliexpress shops). After all, it’s quite normal that prices can’t compete if you consider the numbers we are talking about… the meters of cables sold to flashlight enthusiasts are risible compared to the amount sold for other electric use, especially if wholesale.

Pretty Jungian, as I was just going to look around for some. Tnx!

Turnigy silicone wire from hobbyking is pretty good.

If you want high quality stuff acer racing has really good silicone wire.

For stuff like 4awg and below, knukonceptz and shok industries are good.

Huh, wow!

That is one massive dang cable

What are you using it for? An electric truck, a power line or a massive transformer for boosting 120VAC to 750 000V AC?

Enderman probably got it from Dale :smiley: .

Dale probably has a bunch of cables like this to build a 16x21700 Samsung 30T light, just to see the world burn.

Haha that’s not my cable, unfortunately I don’t have a spare $1000 for some cable.
It’s used for car audio :slight_smile:

:open_mouth: that can’t be real… I bet they took the picture after putting the cable in a spring coiling machine :stuck_out_tongue:

Wat kind of car audio? You can weld with that.

I was thinking the same thing… maybe it’s for competition audio? Those guys are serious!

Yeah, subwoofers and stuff :stuck_out_tongue:
Amps and subs can use tens of thousands of watts for the high end gear.
Fun hobby :slight_smile:

An outrageous power system under the hood.
I know I never thought about it before, but if you have a tens of thousands of watts in a car audio system, you are NOT going to get that kind of sustained power out of a single car battery or charging system.
You NEED multiple batteries AND alternators! Not just multiple amps and speakers.
Even though I am not into extreme car audio, lately I have been having alot of fun watching YouTube videos of the builds.
Look at all that heavy gauge silicone wire.
This guy’s channel is very entertaining

I need some more silicone wire.
In the first post I saw $0.26/m in AWG20…which is way lower than what I see. Even in 300m rolls.
fedcas, could you share the links to those wires?

Hi no problem, I didn’t share the link cause I just bought the cheapset option available in that moment and prices and vendors tend to change often on aliepress, but here are the links:
first time i bought here:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/19898
second time here:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1488616

And I didn’t buy 300 m :stuck_out_tongue: just the standard 6m (3 red+3 black) for each size.

P.S. I added a consideration at the end of the OP, after the photo :wink:

Thanks. It’s much more expensive in those shops now….but the results enabled me to refine my searches. Now I see 20 AWG for $0.28. The key seems to seek “20 3m” instead of “20awg”, “awg20”, “10m” and some other variants. Somehow 2 x 3m is just much cheaper (per m) than 2 x 10m…
ADDED:
Though most wires found this way are not of the highly-flexible type.

if it helps:

true, all 4 of them don’t have “20awg” in the title.
And yes, these ones’ price has raised:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Xmas-2x-3M-18-Gauge-AWG-Silicone-Rubber-Wire-Cable-Red-Black-Flexible/32243423779.html

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Promotion-2x-3M-20-Gauge-AWG-Silicone-Rubber-Wire-Cable-Red-Black-Flexible/32427247516.html

(i’m not posting the other 2 links cause they are not working anymore)