What Is American Wire Gauge (AWG)?

When it comes to wire gauge, the more oversized, the better; the American Wire Gauge (Short for AWG) standard governs the width of electrical wire used primarily in North America. The standard specifies the wire widths ranging from 0000 to 40, with the diameter decreasing as the wire gauges rise. American Wire Gauge is also comprehended as Brown & Sharpe wire gauge. To determine how many wires you need for your project, you must first calculate how much current you will be using and then match that up with the appropriate gauge wire based on its ampacity rating. For example, if your load draws 12 amps at 120 volts and you need 20 feet of 18AWG copper wire, then you would need two conductors (one hot and one neutral) that are each 6 feet long. American wire gauge is a measurement used to gauge the diameter of electrical wire. It's most widely used in North America, not metric. The gauge number given to a wire is the diameter of its cross-section in thousandths of an inch. So if you have a wire that's 28 AWG (American Wire Gauge), it means that it's 28/1000 inches wide. This system is intuitive. It's easy to understand how thick a piece of metal is just by looking at it, but it can be tricky to convert between AWG numbers and actual diameters when working with non-metric units. Some people will tell you that the gauge of wire measures its cross-sectional area. This is true, but it's not the whole story. The gauge of wire is a measure of its diameter. It's also called "AWG" or "American Wire Gauge," used in the USA and Canada. The diameter of a wire increases as you go up in gauge numbers, which means that a 1/0 (or 000) gauge wire has a smaller diameter than an 8/0 (or 0000) gauge wire. If you're working with American wire gauges, there are two ways to read them as numbers or words. Numbers are easy. They're just what they sound like 1/0 (or 000), 2/0 (or 00), 4/0 (or 0), etc. Words are trickier because they use British spelling rules, so instead of saying "aught," we say "aught." Instead of saying "ought," we say "ought. " So instead of reading 3/0 as three zeros (which would be pronounced "three oh"), we say three aught instead!