Is there a minimum length for power cords?


A cable manufacturer's website states the following:

"However, any length shorter than 1.8 meters (5.9 feet)will begin to degrade the effectiveness of the shielding and filtering capabilities; regardless of who is the manufacturer. Power cords are not like speaker cable and interconnects where shorter is better."

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience as to the validity of this statement?
128x128owenlee

Showing 1 response by davehrab

My short answer to the length question is ... 1.5 meters and 2.5 meters helps reduce SWVR

SWVR is ... Standing Wave Voltage Ratio or standing waves created by the difference of the minimum and maximum voltage the cable is conducting

I see two issues with poor SWVR ... first as with Power Correction Factor the further away you are from the Ideal number the less efficient the power deliver will be wasting energy ... this has to do with the deliver of the current

The second is Standing waves are created within the cable at certain intervals when all the direct energy from the source is not completely consumed by the Load and some is reflected back to the source ... here the reflected wave from the load back to the source collides with the direct waves from the source at particular intervals along the cable and a Ringing is created from this collision ... this ringing is created by the collision rate at which the primary and reflected waves fronts collide ...

How many times per second these wave fronts collide at a specific point along the cable creates what I believe is called a Beat Frequency ... the collision rate and creations of Beat Frequencies at these specific intervals are generally in RF region

It is not the standing wave that is creating the RF but the rate of collisions of the standing waves at a specific point along the cable that creates the Beat Frequency in the RF region ... reduce the collisions and you reduce the RF they create

The collisions points I believed are called harmonics and the first point is at the cables mid point .. the second harmonic of these collision is at the quarter (25%) points of the cable and so on up into the 3rd 4th and 5th harmonics until the energy is diminished

By using cables that are 1.5 meters and 2.5 meters long there appears to be a shift or optimizing in the points that these collisions occur at and a reductions of the Beat Frequencies ... reducing the RF that is created by the collisions

This is my back of the Napkin Theory and as you know ...

In Theory ... Theory and Practice are the same ... unfortunately in Practice they aren’t
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