Stupid power cord question.

[DaveF]

From the "there are no stupid questions" area.

I have a small farm. Most of it is on 120v for various reasons. So I am running evga 1300 units for a lot of my stuff.
If I run anything thinner then 16 gauge power cords they get very warm.

Now I am home, I have a 1500W space heater in the bedroom. We only have 1 zone for heat so it's either heat the entire place at night or just the bedroom.
It's one of these: https://www.vornado.com/shop/heaters/vh10-whole-room-heater it's power cord is 18 gauge at best. But it will pull 12+ amps all night and not even get warm to the touch.

So using small words, because I am obviously too stupid to figure it out myself, can someone explain WHY?
Power is power, resistance is resistance. As far as I can tell this space heater have melted the wire by now. But it's finishing it's 3rd winter here.
And yes I use a Avalon 4 to heat the back room when it needs it.

Thanks,
Dave

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[1715104057]

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[vm1990]

its quite simple the heater will very very rarely use full power as it will get up to its temperature and just need to keep topping up so that cable has time to cool down. a miner uses full power all the time because there just pigs so heat keeps in the cable

[DaveF]

OK so checking it's only 7.5A. I didn't know that it did not pull full power all the time.

According to the Kill-A-Watt the space heater pulls a steady 873 watts as it runs.
According to the same Kill-A-Watt the D3 that I have with 2 working boards, plugged into a cheap 1000 watt power supply pulls 803 watts.

The D3 has a 16 gauge cord that is a little warm. According to the IR thermometer its a little (8 to 14 degrees) above room temperature.
The heater (pulling close to 9% more power) with 18 gauge wire is the same temp as the floor it sits on.

All in all it's not a big deal, I just don't get it.

That or the 16 gauge cable that came with the powersupply is crap. Have to check that tomorrow.

-Dave