3 100ft extension cords for christmas lights?

[Jeff590]

I want to light up a tree a ways from my house. I would use (3) 100ft extension cords (ideally 16ga to keep the cost down) and use 3-4 strands of LED lights. Is this do-able?

I looked at some voltage drop calculators on the web and it was only a few percent, but when I went to look at the cords themselves, they had a chart on the package that implied at anything over 100ft with 16ga, you can get 0 amps. (generic table with 10 amps at 50ft, 5 amps at 100ft, and 0 amps at 150ft)

 

[sberry]

It will work fine.

 

[Shiftless]

The voltage at the far end depends on 3 things...
Initial voltage, length of the wire, and the amps flowing in the circuit.

As sberry just said, you’ll be OK with 16 ga. Your current flow is probably way less than one amp.

As an aside, I witnessed a guy use a 100 ft. 18 ga. extension cord to use a 10 inch table saw. The saw actually started for a second but after that it never worked again.
I told him it would kill the motor but he insisted it would be fine.
.
.

 

[yatg]

I found this calculator to be decent:
https://www.calculator.net/voltage-drop-calculator.html

120v over 300' of 16ga at 2 amps gets you 115v at the far end.

But check your actual amps of the lights using a killawatt or similar.


If you want the math

EVD = IR cosθ + IX sinθ

https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/voltage-drop-calculation-methods
That explains everything ...

This one is a little less eggheady
https://iaeimagazine.org/magazine/2017/04/05/voltage-drop-formulas/

 

[theoldwizard1]

It will work fine.

Most LED strings can be daisy chained and they typically have like a 3A-5A fuse in the plug. No sweat on 16 gauge.

 

[Jeff590]

Cool - thanks guys!