AWG Cable Calculator
The awg project provides helpers for selecting electrical cable sizes using American Wire Gauge tables. It exposes a find_awg function and a small web form so you can determine the required cable, voltage drop and conduit size straight from the command line or a browser.
Usage
From the command line:
gway awg find-awg --meters 30 --amps 60
Programmatically:
from gway import gw result = gw.awg.find_awg(meters=30, amps=60) print(result["awg"])
The helper returns a dictionary with fields like awg (gauge), lines, total_meters, voltage drop and other metadata. When no cable satisfies a 3%% drop limit the result contains {"awg": "n/a"} and may include a warning message.
Parameters
find_awg accepts several keyword arguments:
- meters
- Cable length in meters (required).
- amps
- Load in amperes, default 40.
- volts
- System voltage, default 220.
- material
- "cu" for copper or "al" for aluminium.
- max_awg
- Limit the thickest cable allowed. Values may use 1/0 style notation.
- max_lines
- Maximum number of line conductors.
- phases
- 1 or 3 phase AC systems (2 is treated as two phases).
- temperature
- Conductor temperature rating: 60/75/90 or None for automatic selection.
- conduit
- If provided the result includes the minimum trade size for emt, imc, rmc or fmc conduit.
- ground
- Number of ground wires per line.
Additional Tools
- find_conduit
- Utility to calculate conduit diameter for a given AWG and number of cables.
- view_awg_calculator
- Renders /awg/awg-calculator – an HTML form backed by find_awg for quick calculations in the browser.
Data Files
The calculations rely on two CSV tables located under data/awg:
- cable_size.csv
- Base cable properties and ampacities.
- conduit_fill.csv
- Maximum cable counts per conduit size and type.