This has me thinking about the recent discussion about the cord change on the CT vacuums to a smaller gauge. @Rick Christopherson was commissioned to do a test to see if there was any adverse affect on power delivery with the smaller cord.
He found that there really wasn't with the smaller gauge cable.
So, if a CT and a tool plugged into it drawing max current isn't affected by its new smaller gauge cord - which is larger than the 16ga "big" cord supplied with the more powerful tools - why then is a TS55 not able to run adequately with the "smaller" 18ga cords from the sanders ect....
@TylerC , @Festool USA - do you think you could query the engineers for an answer to this question ?
Namely why the vacuums are ok with smaller gauge cords , but the hand tools aren't .
Eh, the CT was changed from 12ga to 14ga? And the US Plug it cords are 16ga and 18ga?
So for metric, that's 3.3 mm^2, 2.1 mm^2 and 0.8 mm^2
So the CT still has a much thicker cord.
The obvious solution is of course to switch to 230V; that cuts currents in half, and reduces the need for thicker wires everywhere. We only have 1 size Plug-It cord here. Normal house-wiring is 2.5mm^2 (about 13ga); that's good for 20A, or 4.6 kW. In my country we usually have 16A circuit breakers (mains is fused 1 phase 35A or 3 phase 25A), but that's still 3.7 kW. The CT's have, I think, 1.5mm^2 (15-16 ga), but I'm not really sure. It's a lot heavier than the Plug-it cords for sure.
And 16A is still enough to run both CT (1200W), OF 2200 (2200W) and have plenty left over to light the garage, in case you only have one circuit there (like by default everyone has here).
No split phases here either. Either 1 phase 230V, or three phases 230V, meaning 400V between the phases.
I suggest you also adopt mm^2 for cable cross section at the same time you adopt 230V
![[tongue]](https://www.festoolownersgroup.com/Smileys/default/tongue_smilie.gif "Tongue Out")
Back to the root of your question; for the calculation of the CT cord they probably had to take into account that people don't unroll the cord, while for the plug-it cords that isn't applicable. Heat buildup in rolled-up cords becomes a problem at some point, so my guess is that played into the thicker CT cord.
