voltage drop calculator

[niel]

it seems to be picking up in interest and to get it away from the subject it was put into i thought it would be a good thing to put it into its own area. this was a joint effort between myself and jon with input from crewzer as well. it is meant as freeware for those not knowing how to come up with the right copper wire gage for their proposed system. you do need excel or its equivalent to run this. i'm not sure if brock allows the downloading of the whole program here or not, but he posted it on his site and i'm assuming it can be downloaded. his address to it is:

www.solar-guppy.com/forum/download/voltage_drop_calculator.zip

a similar excel program can be obtained at download.com under 602pc suite if you don't have excel.

[note: Spread sheet is now hosted by Solar Guppy on his server. Thanks to Henry and Niel. -Bill B.]

BillsSolar pointed out a pretty good one, OpenOffice, It is an MS Office clone same as 602PC. I downloaded it, 106 meg and it works great and free.

http://www.openoffice.org/

[niel]

we'd love to hear from those that use the program. any comments on the program itself are welcome and it is freeware. just make sure you have excel or download one of the free excel clones to use it.
jon
i think 602pc suite 4.2 was 27.5mb so this won't take as long to download. are there any differences in quality as the size of the download might suggest? that's a 4x difference in program size.

After testing the OpenOffice software a little I found it does not understand the IF statements and has a little trouble with charting. I'm thinking 602PC is a better clone.

As pointed in another topic the metric folk don't understand what size Gauge and American Standards are so should we add a simple converter so they could just plug in a number and it will give the conversion in Metrics?

[niel]

no let them do something as we shouldn't have to do all of the work for them. if you get involved in doing this stuff it is good for them to be acquainted with our standards too, as much wire is out there in gage numbers. when they buy an inverter are they going to yell at the manufacturer that they don't know how wide a #10 wire is? they better find out real soon if they want to do this. links are fine, but why do it all for them as they learn nothing then as it pertains to more than just inverters as all equipment at some point will say what gage wires it can handle or should have?

It is just like spanish and english here.. The stores all have english and spanish on the doors and even starting to see it on the shelf as well. We are always converting our blue prints to metric and when we get orders from over seas they are in metric and we have to convert them as well. So im guessing here but I would say Americans are more versed in the convertions than any other part of the world. We are taught both in our schools but I'm willing to bet no one else is. As I remember back in the 70s we was going to switch but never did.

[crewzer]

As pointed in another topic the metric folk don't understand what size Gauge and American Standards are so should we add a simple converter so they could just plug in a number and it will give the conversion in Metrics?

I think that's an excellent idea. I realize that it's a bit of extra work, but it would be a good "customer service" investment. With the rest of the world pretty much converted to the metric system, we need to continue our acceptance of this standard. Besides, the calculator already includes both temperature scales (C and F).

Regards,
Jim / crewzer

[niel]

brock,
are you still getting many hits on the program or any feedback from those that have downloaded it?
jon,
if you do put the conversions into it make it a seperately running program below it. i am still opposed to the putting it into the program itself. tell you what, we can do a poll on it and let others decide yea or nay to putting the metric to gage# conversions into it. if you set it up don't let people be able to vote more than once to keep it fair.

[Brock]

I don't know how many for that perticular file. I just noticed a spike when I first posted it.