Please assure me I'm not going to burn my house down.

toddverrone OP 121 posts                                             02-20-20172:26pm

@jea48 check this:

http://www.southwire.com/ProductCatalog/XTEInterfaceServlet?contentKey=prodcatsheet393

That is the wire I used. The outer jacket is high temp smokeless PVC and the individual wire insulator is FEP or what is commonly referred to as Teflon. I promise I did my homework

It’s good the outer jacket of the cable is PVC . At least for the way you are using the cable it gives a little better physical abuse protection.

Yes, it says the insulation cover for each 24 gauge wire is FEP. Though if you scroll down the page it says the insulation is thermoplastic, which is PVC. I wonder if it is thermoplastic with a layer of Teflon over that?

toddverrone OP 121 posts                                      02-20-2017 10:39am

I promise, if you do the research you can confirm, cat 5 that is UL listed is rated to 300v

Yes, you are correct. But at very low amperage, rated in ma. Example, the ringer voltage on a telco phone system. The voltage on the ringer circuit can averages around 90 volts AC. It can go as high as 140Vac, possibly 150Vac. But the current is very low in the ma range. The circuit is also fuse protected which limits the current.

Again the cat5e cable was never designed/tested/manufactured/UL Listed to be used as a mains 120Vac power cord. If for what ever reason the cord faulted the current available from your electrical panel could be in the hundreds of amps before the branch circuit breaker could react and hopefully trip open breaking the fault. Will all the paralleled #24 gauge wires survive the event? What limiting fuse protection do you have to protect the parallel 24 gauge wire of the power cord?
If the fault is an arcing fault the breaker will never trip as long as the continuous current draw is below the breaker handle rating. Of course the same is true for any power cord. One reason for NEC code AFCI (Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter) branch circuit protection.

Bottom line..... You feel safe with the power cord you have assembled. The PVC outer jacket on the cat5e helps. I personally would not build a power cord using cat5e data cable. I would also not recommend anyone reading this thread do so either.
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Todd WRT...

@williewonka I was using them with a dared mc 7p pre and a class D crown xls1500. 

Did you happen to observe any drop in operating  temperature of the crown xls1500 whilst using the Helix power cables?

My solid state source components ran noticeably cooler (i.e. by a few degrees) when connected with both Helix power cables and IC's.

e.g. My DAC dropped by at least 10 degrees Celsius - i.e. from quites warm to the touch down to room temperature.

Cheers

@jea48 I’ll join you in not recommending anyone use bundled cat 5 cables as PCs. I’m happy with with them, but am aware of their possible safety issues and have taken steps to mitigate them. Despite that, this isn’t a cord that can take the abuse a regular PC can.

@williewonka I can’t say my xls ran any cooler because it’s class D. It ran so cool, the fan hardly ever kicked on, even with the stock cord and it was never even remotely warm in any place I could touch. I saw a post in the tech talk section that made me think of you though. It was a PDF talking about power distortion in an industrial setting and how to mitigate it. One thing it mentioned was that, for industrial switch mode power supplies, having the neutral conductor at least 1.7 times the size of the hot conductor reduced the noise dramatically. Your helix design has the neutral conductor twice as big as the hot, as I’m sure you know..
Not sure if industrial switching power supplies behave like home audio, but interesting none the less.

The Talking Heads coined "Burning down the House".

Happy Listening!