Excellent subject resurrection. I've butted heads with inspectors in my younger days about this, but now that I've matured a bit, I see where I was wrong. My last argument with an inspector yielded the most logical answer. I couldn't seem to understand the harm in running 6/3 Romex in a conduit for a short distance to a detached garage.
His answer was fairly simple and it certainly shut me up on this subject forever. A conduit in the ground is never dry and Romex is not approved for wet locations. People really do go around with the misconception that glued PVC is water-tight. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
