Talk:Electrical wiring

How Should this Article be Organized?
The article says it's about building wiring, and then goes off babbling about transmission systems. I'm not sure that it is at all useful to lump the disparate wiring practices of different parts of the world in one article. The transmission stuff is better covered in a different article. Do we really want an article about lights'n'plugs and panelboards? Here's what I would expect to see covered in a real article on electrical wiring (cribbing wildly from the table of contents of the Canadian Electrical Code) --Wtshymanski 00:13, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Brief overview of building wiring systems (power, commnications, controls)
 * Historical facts, early wiring systems, fire hazards
 * Purpose and origins of electrical wiring codes (US, Canada, UK, other parts of the world if we can get any contributions)
 * Service Equipment
 * Design considerations, loading of circuits
 * Protection
 * Grounding (earthing) and bonding
 * Modern wiring methods, conductors, cables
 * North American practice
 * UK practice
 * Special power circuits
 * Hazardous Locations
 * Examples of locations with explosion hazard
 * Wet and corrosive locations
 * History
 * North American vs. IEC practices
 * Installation of equipment such as transformers, capacitors, etc.
 * Lighting Systems
 * Emergency Systems
 * High Voltage Installations
 * Communication Systems
 * Pools
 * Airports
 * Marinas
 * Railways, Telecomm, Electrical Utilities

I was looking for tips as to how to debug my home wiring setup. I'm trying to install a 3-pole light switch and was interested in background as to what the black wires are, what "hot" or "phase" or "neutral" really means in a practical sense, how to hook that up to a variety of wiring configurations, etc.

Seems to me the 'wiring' article should have a brief definitiion of 'wiring' with links to 'power wiring' (its current content, more or less), 'electronics wiring' (soldering, circuit theory...); the 'power wiring' section should then be a big synopsis of a bunch of other articles, some structured like the code-books, which are designed to tell people what a finished product should look like, and some structured like a how-to book, and taylored to individuals trying to find out how to plan a new bathroom, troubleshoot a problem or install a new circuit. In general, I'd like to see articles on all the trades include a very rich interlinking of articles on tools and methods, so if you're trying to do something and look up an article about it, you discover all the specialized tools and methods that exist, that you may not have known about. --Robmonk 04:12, 27 April 2006 (UTC)


 * From What Wikipedia is not: "Instruction manuals - while Wikipedia has descriptions of people, places, and things, Wikipedia articles should not include instruction - advice (legal, medical, or otherwise), suggestions, or contain "how-to"s. This includes tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, video game guides, and recipes. Wikibooks is a Wikipedia sister-project which is better suited for such things. ..." I think we have to be particularly careful here since wiring codes and practices vary so much. --agr 14:30, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Connection methods
I think there should be a discussion of connection methods: terminal blocks vs. wire nuts vs. soldering, etc. I'm under the impression that US and European practices differ here. --agr 16:07, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Electrical services
The article electrical services has a lot of duplicate information to the article Electrical wiring, and really shouldn't be it's own article. There is some new information (from what I can tell) that can be merged into the previously existing article.--Esprit15d 14:40, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Upon further examination, I see that much of the electrical services article is copied verbatim from this one.--Esprit15d 15:20, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes Nixon pogiso (talk) 08:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It is a redirect since 2006. Gah4 (talk) 12:29, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It is a redirect since 2006. Gah4 (talk) 12:29, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

"Colour codes" table overhauled
Well folks, I've dived in and reworked the entire table (Be Bold!). I hope you like it. The table seemed like it was originally 2 separate tables spliced together. Combining the tables made sense, because the color codes for FLEXIBLE and FIXED cables are closely-related, but distinct conventions. I did my best to preserve the meaning of the various entries, as best I could figure them out. The table is certainly much clearer, where previously it was hard-to-read, ambiguous and inconsistent. Now, it also may have clearer errors. I apologize if I have misinterpreted any content from the previous version of the table, and strongly encourage any regional experts to review and correct any inadvertent mistakes.

As a lingering mystery, I still can't figure out what "ICI applications" means in the footnotes. Googling turns up little except the name of a particular consulting company. I have now flagged "ICI" as "vague", and propose deleting it if nobody can explain what it means. Reify-tech (talk) 17:38, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Long time later, the table has been overhauled again. Almost every entry got a standard listed. Only China is missing, and "pre-2004 IEE" remains ambiguous, as the body seemed to only rule over BS 7671 standard, until that one got aligned with the rest of Europe under IEC. The rules remain in use in old installations and in some ex-British colonies. Added a lot of countries to the NEC entry, with source, as a lot of ~120 V America follows it.

And probably more importantly, a lot of junk was removed. Colors listed for the sole reason that the rules don't prohibit their use and they happen to be used. The rules for flexible cables find no basis in any standards, other than for the US one (maybe, citations needed), so the distinction has been completely removed. Tracerneo (talk) 02:00, 20 September 2022 (UTC)


 * (1) AS/NZS 3000:2018 has a specific section on cables, so I added that to the table (with references to the two relevant sections of the standard).
 * (2) Table alignment for the flexible cables section, presumably for the US, was crossed over into the Canadian standard. The above comment seems to indicate it is a US only thing, so I fixed the table alignment so that flexible is solely aligned with the NEC standard (and the CE standard only has two sections). If someone who knows the NEC / EC standards could confirm this, that would be great, e.g. if it was supposed to be a shared section that is common across both standards. (In this case, maybe just repeat it for each standard, to make it clearer). Sgryphon (talk) 02:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Table Modifications for the Color Blind
I am partly color blind and wire colors have been the bane of my existence. This chart is no different as the wire colors are pictographs. Fine for the non color blind. But for me, frustrating and confusing. Is that brown or green? Maybe dark red? Copper color or brown? I can't tell. So I humbly request that someone please also put the color in the table along with the pictographs. An example of a problem I have reading the chart: At the top of the table under flexible cord we have the row "Australia, New Zealand (AS/NZS 3000:2007 3.8.3)". Two pictographs represent two wire colors I can not make out on first glance. The wire to the left could be dark green or brown. The wire to the right darker orange or red. I then have to look around the chart at the other colors to get a feel for the shades used to be able to figure out the colors. Thaddeusw (talk) 14:49, 9 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Named colours added (as per SpinningSpark's suggestion). Sgryphon (talk) 02:03, 14 January 2023 (UTC)


 * The colour can be made to show as a tooltip on mouseover like in this example. Is that any use to you? It should also get read out by screenreaders for the blind.SpinningSpark 22:40, 3 December 2022 (UTC)