cat 5 for power injection

[bernard]

Just want to make sure I can take cat 5 cable for power injection. I think I saw that in the 101 tutorial. I'll look for it again but thought I would still ask for advice for cat 5 and other suggestions.
my need is for 5 V only maybe 10 - 15 ft away from power source. I assume I can tie 3 wires together for +5V and the others for ground. Thanks!

 

[David_AVD]

For the most part, wire is wire so you could use CAT5 cable for power. Why 3 for +5V and the rest (5) for ground? You could use 2 pairs (4 wires) for each.

 

[bernard]

So much for me, the 101 does not seem to mention cat 5 but security cable instead which is a little heavier gauge.

Cat 5e I have is 24 gauge. Not sure what the rating is but I read somewhere that each wire can handle about 0.5 amps. If I pair up 4 for + and for 4 for -, that would be only 2 amps. for some reason, that does not seem right. Any thoughts?

(David, I meant combining 4 wires together, not 3, I guess a "fat finger" mistake)

 

[David_AVD]

The official spec for CAT5 is something odd like 577mA per conductor.

At 24 AWG per wire, one pair of a CAT5 is in theory a similar overall cross section to a single 14/0.2 wire in a security cable.

I'm using CAT5 to power some 10W Ray Wu DMX RGB floods. That's one pair for the DMX data, one pair for 0V, another for +12V and the 4th not used.