• Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    6 days ago

    Grounding wire is just like regular wire over here. The colors we use are: Blue for the neutral, brown for the hot and green/yellow for earth/ground.

    There are more colors for other situations, but these are the most used. Black is also used a lot and usually means a switched hot, so brown to a switch and black to for example a light fixture. These are often done in a thinner gauge because the switch can’t switch a big load anyways and usually lights don’t use that much power.

    Normal gauges are 2.5mm2 (14 AWG) for regular 16A circuits and 1.5mm2 (16 AWG) for switched circuits. Keep in mind this is at 250V, so 16A gives you a hecking lot of power (4000 watt continuous load). The circuits are designed such you can even go a bit above this for a short time. The wires are designed to handle 25A without any issue, but are limited by the protection equipment (“fuse”). All wires need to be single stranded, multi stranded can only be used in specific situations, never in permanent installations (except for shielding wires which are usually by definition stranded and will normally never carry any current).