Copper Clad Aluminum--The True Story

Things aren't always what they seem to be.

Take jumper cables, for example. If you go shopping for jumper cables you'll find prices all over the place. But they all look pretty much the same. So what's up? 

There are some really inexpensive jumper cables out there. And they look pretty good at first glance, in fact they look pretty much like the expensive ones. But, they don’t weigh as much, and that’s the first clue. 

If you look closely you’ll see they are made of aluminum cable.

But it doesn’t look like aluminum. It looks like regular copper wire. 

You might be able to look in the clamps where the wire is cut and see the ends. You'll see shiny aluminum in the center of the wire. It may have been painted with copper paint or actually plated with copper, but it’s still aluminum wire. 

Is someone trying to pull a fast one on you, making it look like copper? Maybe, maybe not. 

Aluminum tends to oxidize pretty easily, so copper coating helps prevent that. That's a good reason to plate it. But they also may be trying to fool the customer.

What’s wrong with aluminum cable? 

Actually, there’s nothing really wrong with it. It just doesn’t have the same current carrying capacity as copper in the same gauge sizes. 

To get roughly close to copper’s current capacity, you’d have to go up at least one gauge size in aluminum cable. So to get the starting current capacity of 8 gauge copper booster cables you would have to use 6 gauge aluminum cables; to match 2 gauge copper cables you might have to go all the way to 1/0 in aluminum, depending on temperature.

But that isn’t how aluminum cables are packaged. They are packed to look just like copper in the same gauge sizes. That's the way they keep the price down. Unfortunately, the price and the performance are both down when they do that.

Here’s the critical consideration: When it’s cold out, and you’re trying to jump start a car with a dead battery, you want to get all the power possible from the good battery to the weak one. You’re not trying to limit the available power, you’re trying to maximize it.

The good news is Rescue booster cables from Quick Cable are copper. So you get the power you need when you need it. No games, no tricks.

To learn more about copper and aluminum ampacity, click here.