The boss wants to make up a temporary service that could be reused and set up fast on a restoration job. He wanted to know if there was a flexible cord (like sj, so, etc) that could be used as a service entrance cable. I told him that there was not any that I knew of that would meet 230.43.

Does anyone know of any such cord?

Brian

Way back in 1996 I spent the summer in Atlanta and wired 196 tents for the olympics. Most had a panel and branch circuits. Most of the panels were fed from genys or a large dist panel set up by the city. We treated everything as temporary wiring and didn't need to be too worried about 230, only the temp wiring article and the "carnival" article (525). For the branches we used SO and for the feeders we used W cord. Problem with W cord is that the 4-5 (#4, 5 cond) has an outer jacket about 1/4" thick and weighs about 2 lbs per foot. I ran about 12000 feet of it (and 35000' of SO); I was a lot younger then. We were a Virginia based nonunion contractor and Atlanta is a big union town. My point is that everything passed inspection and we didn't even have to "influence" the inspector ... although the local contractor charged us a fortune to pull the permits for us.
That's my useless 2 cents worth.

Are you trying to supply the house panel, or just provide some temporary circuits for tools, etc. during the work? Could you use cam-locks with W or EISL, or even pin & sleeve and some tails to the lugs on the panel? Forgive my ignorance of any applicable NEC regs, for I am a lowly entertainment/theatre electrician. We do crazy things all the time, and haven't burned anything down (yet).

[This message has been edited by noderaser (edited 03-07-2007).]