romex for secondaries??

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

While rummaging through Home Depot this morning, I saw they have 1000 foot
boxes of 14 ga Romex.  I wonder how it would work for a secondary?  Say you
had a 12" diameter form, each turn would be around 3 feet long, so you'd get
around 300 turns out of the box.  You'd wind up with 3 parallel windings on
the form, which I assume you'd want to hook in parallel. The insulation is
kind of bulky, though. At roughly 1/2" per turn, that 300 turns would be 150
inches, or 12 feet plus...  You might want to make a multilayer winding of
sorts at the bottom (forming a sort of conical winding)

But, this got me thinking.  You can also get SPT-1 and SPT-2 lamp cord (aka
zip cord) in huge lengths (I've bought 10,000 feet of 18ga on a spool) and
various gauges (that thin speaker wire, etc.), and it is VERY cheap.