What Up? What Up? Everybody? Welcome to another episode of Let's Ask
Paul, the podcast where you get to ask me Paul Abernathy any question you
want about the National Electrical Code. I'll give you my opinion. You can
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it that way, Okay, got a great episode today. A question was
sent into me asking me to explain a calculation for ranges and without you know,
I think I've done enough videos in training about ranges in self and how
you calculate them. That it makes it kind of hard to kind of convey
that and a podcast without physically seeing it. So over on fast Tracks Tube
we have a part one and part two series that's based on range calculations that
you can watch there. But one thing that I noticed in the question that
I want to really talk about today is they said, Paul, I get
how you do it. If I have three ranges and one of them is
five kW. One of those three, let's say five kws, six kW
and eight kW. Well, of course all of those are going to fall
under column B, and Note three says you can compare B to C because
C you could take the three and it's simply would be the value from column
C. Remembering that column A and B in Table two twenty fifty five are
actually percentages, whereas column C is actually the demand factor, the demand value,
right, the maximum demand itself. Okay, So it can get confusing,
for example, when you're applying the different notes, and when you can
apply the notes, and what happens if you happen to have a situation where
they fall under column B and column C. Now, always remember that the
notes say that you can use column C or is to be used. Column
C is to be used in all cases except where note three comes into play.
So note one in note two are just dealing it when you have ranges
that are over twelve that are either all the same or unequal of ratings.
Okay, that's pretty straightforward. You're still using column C, but you're applying
the notes, and it talks about again how you do that. I think
what becomes more confusing for people, and it's not going to be so much
a real world environment, because I'm gonna be honest with you, when you
have a multifamily dwelling things like that typically going to use the optional method anyway,
so you're not going to be using table two twenty to fifty five.
But for an exam, this is where people get confused because in an exam,
you never know what kind of crap they're going to throw at you,
and in this case, for those that are taking an exam, you might
get some wonky question. I doubt it that you'll get it the way I'm
getting ready to present it, but if you did, you might get one
who says, well, I have a nine kW range and I have a
five kW range and a six kW range, right, And you're thinking,
okay, wait a minute, Wait a minute. So in all cases,
you're going to use column C to establish your kW first. So that's three
cooking appliances, three different ranges, right. So in that scenario you left
column you just simply go down to three and you go all the way to
the right. That's column C. That's your demand and kW and that would
be fourteen k aw right. Makes sense? But you one people, Sometimes
people forget and this is where I think it gets controversial, and some people
will agree and disagree here. But some people believe that if it all doesn't
follow perfectly under column C, then you just have to throw the baby out
with the bathwater. I don't believe that's the intent of it. Now.
The side effect of that is it could end up being something kind of wonky.
And I'll show you this and just an example that we just did.
But also a nine, a five, and a six kW range all together,
okay. And this is for the service or feeder load calculation, by
the way, right, not a brand CERCA. Okay. So if the
three appliances and you were to take the and you use column C, which
is what you use unless note three is applicable, then it would be fourteen
kW. Right for a nine, A six, and a five makes sense,
that's just go to fourteen wambam, thank you, ma'am, and be
done. However, no three does come into play for two of these ranges,
not all three. So there are people that believe at this point that
you just can't use the column B, that you just have to stick with
the column C, and then that's just fourteen, is it. I don't
believe that is the case for me. I believe that you can split these
up. And I'm sure some other people will say I'm wrong. But again,
if you go looking on the internet, you go looking around, you're
gonna see it's a taboo topic. No videos, no discussions, nobody wants
to talk about it. And so I'm going to talk about it. So
obviously we know that fourteen kW can be used. That one's easy because none
of those exceed twelve. You with me, So the question is can I
break this calculation up and do the two ranges that fall under column B and
do separately for columns C and then add the totals together. And I believe
you can. I believe that not all of them fall nicely under note three,
and the ones that don't have to use C and the ones that do
fall under note three. And for those that want to know what Note three
is, that is over one and three quarter kW through eight and three quarter
kW, so through means including eight and three quarter okay, whereas Note two
is over eight and three quarter. And so I think what happens here is
that you have no choice but to separate these out. The code is not
clear to say, hey, you know what he if it all doesn't fall
nicely under the neat little package of column C, then you just got to
you just gotta go with column C and screw all these other abilities to use
these demain that's not what I see when I read it. Now. If
that's what they mean, then the code panel needs to clarify that. And
I've never, to be honest with you, I've never sent in a public
input on this because typically it's not going to be this albatross that we're talking
about. Usually, if you look at videos and training and books and everything,
it all falls nice and neatly in though all of the ranges, if
you have multiple ranges, they're all over eight and three quarter. And then
it makes it easy, right, because you just do it. And if
you happen to have any that are over twelve and they're unequal ratings, then
you use Note two, and any of them that is less than twelve,
you just make twelve. So if it was a nine, a ten,
or eleven, you just make it a twelve, and you just do your
math. You get an average. Once you get that average, and once
that average, you want to see how many that exceeds twelve, and it's
five percent for every kW that exceeds twelve. If you don't understand what I'm
saying there, because it is a podcast, make sure you go to fasttrackstube
dot com. That's fast tracks Tube fas t t R a x tub and
we have videos over there that talk about range calculations. It's a part one
and a part two and it explains it in extreme detail. But me,
like everybody else, I explain the the easy to understand aspects of that.
That the straightforward stuff. But I think what we don't talk about is what
happens if not everything fits nicely under column C, but the other ranges are
applicable to Note three. Can you separate it or does it all have to
be under and I don't think that they're in my opinion. And again,
you know you can. You'll have people out there to say Paul is stupid,
whatever, he doesn't get it, whatever. But I haven't seen your
videos, I haven't seen your articles. I haven't seen you teaching it.
When you do have two that are under eight and three quarter, let's say,
and then you have one range that is over eight and three quarter,
and how you would apply that? Now, I do see an example in
the handbook, and I believe the example in the handbook is wrong because in
the handbook it says that you use note two and you take any that are
rated eight kW and you make them twelve. If you go back and look
at the public inputs or at this point it was rops back in eighty four,
you'll see that this was tried to get to explained a little bit by
Tom Henry in a submission and it ended up being rejected. And the code
panel made it clear that No. Two does not apply to any range unless
it's over eight and three quarter. And that's what the code panel said.
So in the example in the handbook under two twenty point to fifty five,
or the example in link says that you take that eight kW and you make
it a twelve. I don't believe you can do that personally, because it's
not eight over eight and three quarter. So that's why I think that's an
error in the handbook. It's an error in my opinion in link because the
charging statement for Note two is that it only is applicable if it is over
eight and three quarter through twenty seven. Okay, So I think that you're
forced to have to split these up. You're still going to compare them to
C because we already know fourteen thousand and C is the value. That we
could just take all three of them and go all the way to column C.
That's acceptable. But I think you able to split these up. And
so how would this look. Well, that one range, that's the nine
kW, using column C for that one because the charge says you use column
C all the time unless Note three applies. Well, Note three doesn't apply
to that one. So it would be eight kW for that one nine kWh
right, because again it's one appliance. Column C says eight kW can be
used. Remember, folks, if it is a nine kW range, it
still would only use eight thousand in the calculation if it was a ten,
eleven or even a twelve, you're still only going to use eight kW for
the single range. It's important that you understand that concept when it comes to
service and feeder calculations. Now, looking at the information, if we were
to do this and dissect it out, let's see what the difference would be.
So we know fourteen kW is our base for the three because none of
those exceed twelve. Okay, so we're in column C. No notes are
necessary, don't need to hit any notes for that type of thing, all
right. So in this case, what if we draw back in the two
appliances that fall under column B. So we're separating it out. We're using
note three, and we have two appliances and the multiplier here the percentage is
sixty five percent. So you take the nameplate, so it's six thousand member
in our example, six thousand plus five thousand, and in case you forgot,
we said, what do you got when you've got a six thousand,
a five thousand, and a nine thousand kW s ranges here? What do
you do? Okay? So that's eleven thousand, and we could take that
times sixty five percent and that's seven thousand one hundred and fifty and then and
that's using column B. And then I to me at that point, now,
I would add the value from column C to that value, right,
and that would be the eight. So I would take the seventy one fifty
plus eight, and that is fifteen thousand, one hundred and fifty. So
column C, by using the three appliance is yields the best result that's fourteen
thousand, So that's what I would use. I would use column C in
that case. So I think that what happens here is you know, and
at the end of the day, it's probably in the real world not going
to make much of a difference. Okay, a little bit here or there
for the service count, but it's not going to be dramatically devastating to your
load calculation. Hell, half of the people out there probably aren't doing load
calculations anyway. They're just looking at it and going two hundred AMP, one
hundred and fifty AMP, one hundred AMP, four hundred AMP, and they're
just doing it, and so there's a lot of headroom there. But I
think that it's important for me when I'm trying to talk about things that people
won't talk about it is, okay, I've got three ranges and they don't
all fit nice and neatly in any one column. Now, obviously, again
I can use C, because as long as none of them are over twelve,
then I can just pull the kW demand from column C. And that's
where we got the fourteen. But in my case it falls in multiple columns,
and so the one falls in C because it's not over twelve, and
the other one falls in column B. I have. I'm permitted to use
column B by Note three, So I'm going to apply it to Note three,
okay, And I think that the foundation for this is really if you
go look at Note three, it says, you know what, you can
do column A separately, column B separately and add them together, and that's
okay. So I think here the same logic would be that I can do
the column whatever it is, and then if there's a range that falls outside
of column A or B that's actually falls under C, then I'm going to
use column C and then and again for one range of the eight thousand and
so I add that to the value I get from column B, and I
think that's that option, and in this case that exceeds the fourteen. So
I'm going to go with column C because that's the best value, that's the
lowest value would that would be able to utilize. So I mean, I
fully understand that there'll be some people that say, no, no, no,
you have to go In all cases, you have to go with column
C because it's not perfect. All of them don't fall outside of column A
or B, and of course none of them exceeded twelve, so you always
know that column C has to be used, but it tells you that you're
permitted to use Note three. I don't see anything in here that says all
of them have to fall under Note three. I don't see any of that.
And so if somebody thinks that's what you do, then I encourage them
to submit a change to the Nationalogical Code. And if you didn't do it
for the twenty twenty six, that boat is sailed. But at the end
of the day, I really don't see the harm either way. I'm gonna
I'm able to apply some demands. In this case, C was better than
taking the values in B and adding them to the values in C. Right,
So again I think it works out. And again I fully understand that
some people will say nope, nope, nope. You never can intermix column
B with column C and all that kind of stuff. And personally I disagree.
I think that you're forced to do that because I don't know how you
because you know in the handbook, which adds to the problem. Again,
I'll reiterate. If you go look at the handbook, it says that when
you had these multiple ranges, it says that any of them that are less
than twelve that you take at twelve. But you can't get there. And
remember I told you the public input from nineteen eighty four that Tom Henry submitted,
and the code panel responded with a simple answer. It says, Note
two is not applicable to any range that is less than eight and three quarter.
Don't there any range that is not over well, yeah, any any
range that is eight and three quarter or less, it doesn't apply. You
can't use No. Two. It's got to be over eight and three quarter
through twenty seven kW. So then they made it really clear. So I
don't know that there's any other way that you can you can apply this,
to be honest with you, Now, in the real world, it's probably
again never going to be an issue, probably never going to come up.
I think multi multi family dwellings are probably all going to have the same size
range anyway, so you know, it's probably a moot point. But I
think for exams you just have to be aware of it, and because you
never know what could appear on an exam, and there's a good chance at
the people that submitted it to the exam or that helped write the question don't
understand it either. But again, I don't see anything that says that I,
as long as note three is applicable to any of the ranges, I
see nothing that says that I can't apply that. Whether somebody feels personally or
strongly otherwise, then I encourage you to email me and explain your position to
me, help me understand why I could not split these loads up. And
my email address is support s U P P O R T at fasttracksystem dot
com. That's a A S T T R A X S Y S T
E M dot com. I'm not interested in your opinion, okay, because
your opinion is your opinion. My opinion is my opinion. But if you
have some kind of data to back it up to say that you can't,
don't send me no crap that says, well, Paul, it's logical you
can't because they aught to I don't want to hear it. You're going to
have to justify it to me. Otherwise it's just conjecture and it doesn't do
any good for me. All Right. I want to learn like everybody else,
and I see nothing in here that says that that I cannot that I
can't apply Note three to any of the ranges that would be applicable to Note
three, and those that are not, I continue to use, like what
the code says, I use column see for that, and that's how I
would do it. All right, folks, Hopefully that explains it to you,
at least my position on it, because there has been recently people asking
about that, and I just wanted to give you my opinion on that based
on what I read to twenty dot fifty five. Now, again, in
real life, you're going to use the optional method, and at that point
you're just going to take name plates from everything and you're going to get the
values from the name plates. And at the end of the day, it's
it's fairly simple because you're going to go to the what is it to twenty
dot eighty four, right, and when you go to to twenty dot eighty
four, then it's it's pretty straightforward just going to go to the number of
dwelling units. In this case, Let's say there was however many there was,
and you're going to see a percentage demand, and that's what you would
do for that, right, and that's going to be what your range contribution
would be for that. But typically you don't really use Table two twenty eight
four B until you've added everything up and then you go there. But that
doesn't stop you from if somebody asked you an optional method for a certain number
of ranges in a certain number of multi family dwellings dwelling units, that you
could also use this for three or more multifamily to come up with the range
contribution because you're simply just taking nameplate values for that, I mean, that's
what it tells you to do, right. So ultimately, yeah, hopefully
that answers any question you might have in my opinion on it. You can
agree to disagree until then, take care of stay safe, God bless,
and we'll see you in another episode. Let's ask Paul baskballthings nothings, nothing,