Electric splitter is here, electrical spec mysteries. Help!

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gyrfalcon

gyrfalcon

Minister of Fire
Dec 25, 2007
1,836
Champlain Valley, Vermont
I bought the NorthlineExpress 4-ton log splitter and it came this afternoon, but the manual uses terms for electrical specs that are total Greek to me. Can anybody interpret for me?

1. It says "Connect the main leads to a standard 120V electrical supply which has protection devices of under-voltage, over-voltage, over-current as well as a residual current device (RCD) which maximum residual current rated at 0.03A."

Hah? I haven't the faintest idea what any of that means, and don't even want to know. Can I assume the outdoor grounded outlet for power tools on my house likely meets those conditions?

2. Also, it says, "check that there is a regulation differential switch upstream." All righty. Might this be what we call a fuse or a circuit breaker?

3. And then "Be sure the extension cord is no less than 2.5 mm to allow sufficient current flow to the motor." Am I right that that's the equivalent of a 10-gauge extension cord? Really? The manual says this tool draws 1500 Watts, which by my calculation is 12.5 amps. Why would you need a 10-gauge extension cord for that?

4. Then it says I should "Ground the log splitter" and "prevent body contact with grounded surfaces, pipes, radiators," etc. the usual stuff. How on earth do I ground this thing? To what and with what? How are you supposed to ground a tool you're using out in the yard or in a wooden (natch) woodshed?

Any electro-Greek speakers around here who can translate any of this stuff for me?
 
I have a 5 ton task force splitter, made by the finest craftsman in China. In 4 yrs. all I have done is plug mine into a 20 amp circuit with a breaker and used a 10 wire extension cord when needed
 
Good to know. Thanks! Sorry to be so ignorant, but by "10 wire" do you mean 10 gauge?

Also, how long an extension cord do you use? The manual for my 4-ton says not to use longer than about 30 feet, but it would sure make my life easier if I could run a longer one.
 
Sounds like China's finest used google translate to put the manual together, with the help of some US lawyering! Here's my take embedded... (yes I'm an engineer, but one of the imaginary ones.)


gyrfalcon said:
I bought the NorthlineExpress 4-ton log splitter and it came this afternoon, but the manual uses terms for electrical specs that are total Greek to me. Can anybody interpret for me?

1. It says "Connect the main leads to a standard 120V electrical supply which has protection devices of under-voltage, over-voltage, over-current as well as a residual current device (RCD) which maximum residual current rated at 0.03A."

Hah? I haven't the faintest idea what any of that means, and don't even want to know. Can I assume the outdoor grounded outlet for power tools on my house likely meets those conditions?

Power conditioning sounds like major overkill to me... I wouldn't worry about it.

2. Also, it says, "check that there is a regulation differential switch upstream." All righty. Might this be what we call a fuse or a circuit breaker?

Yeah, I would think a 20 amp circuit breaker about covers this one...

3. And then "Be sure the extension cord is no less than 2.5 mm to allow sufficient current flow to the motor." Am I right that that's the equivalent of a 10-gauge extension cord? Really? The manual says this tool draws 1500 Watts, which by my calculation is 12.5 amps. Why would you need a 10-gauge extension cord for that?

I'd feel pretty good plugging that guy into a 12 gauge cord up to maybe 50 feet or so. You could look at the cord rating, but that is the same wattage as a serious hairdryer.

4. Then it says I should "Ground the log splitter" and "prevent body contact with grounded surfaces, pipes, radiators," etc. the usual stuff. How on earth do I ground this thing? To what and with what? How are you supposed to ground a tool you're using out in the yard or in a wooden (natch) woodshed?

You could buy a heavy duty battery charger type alligator clip, about 4 feet of 12 gauge solid copper wire, attach the clip via it's screw to one stripped end of the wire, strip about 8" off the other end of wire, clamp the clip to some bare metal on the splitter, then jam the longer stripped end of the wire into the (dampened) ground. Alternatively, you could also clamp a cheap car jumper cable to the splitter, drive a small cheap metal fence post/tent stake into the ground next to the splitter, and clamp the other end of the cable to the post/stake. (however, I am far too lazy to go to that much trouble.) I would happily split would with no fear of electrocution.

Any electro-Greek speakers around here who can translate any of this stuff for me?
Click to expand...
 
1. Plug it in directly to an outlet or by using a 12-gauge extension cord.
2. Split wood.

S
 
Not sure how close your nearest Harbor Freight is, but I use 100 ft of their 10 guage extension cord to my splitter and it was about 1/3 the price I found anywhere else. Also finely crafted in China I'm sure.
 
Come to think of it, I have used my 100 ft. 12 wire extension with no problem. Just remember, these instructions come to you from the same people that tried to poison every dog in America :lol:
 
I think I've used my 12 gauge extension cord also. It's possible that the cord could get too hot or you could experience voltage drop over long distances. I think I'd just go split the wood and feel for too much heat coming off the cord. It's best to use a 10 gauge cord with an electric heater also.

Matt
 
SolarAndWood said:
Not sure how close your nearest Harbor Freight is, but I use 100 ft of their 10 guage extension cord to my splitter and it was about 1/3 the price I found anywhere else. Also finely crafted in China I'm sure.
Click to expand...

Closest is a couple hundred miles away, unfortunately. But there's always the Web. Thanks for the tip.
 
Beowulf said:
Sounds like China's finest used google translate to put the manual together, with the help of some US lawyering! Here's my take embedded... (yes I'm an engineer, but one of the imaginary ones.)
Click to expand...

Whoa! Thanks very much!

Actually, I was surprised to find that most of this manual is in perfectly comprehensible, even correct English. It's just in this more technical electrical stuff that it turns into semi-gobbledygook. I'd ignore it, but since I'm wading into an area I know next to nothing about, figured maybe I'd better check with the experts here first.
 
pistonslap said:
Come to think of it, I have used my 100 ft. 12 wire extension with no problem. Just remember, these instructions come to you from the same people that tried to poison every dog in America :lol:
Click to expand...

Groan. Not to mention their own babies more recently, apparently.
 
Thanks, all. You're the best, as always.
 
What happens to an electric motor if you get a voltage drop by using too long a cord or too small wire (bigger gauge)? Will it burn it out, or does it just slow down, or what?
 
If you have a smaller than needed extension cord, the motor will run hot, and eventually self destruct. As the voltage sags, the amps increase to make up the wattage. At load, (and electric motors pull more amps at higher loads), the upshot is a hotter motor.

The insulation and power factor should be on the motor nameplate. The following link will tell you how tolerant your motor is of heat:.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/nema-insulation-classes-d_734.html

This link will address voltage drop:

http://www.franklin-electric.com/business/Watersystems/Service/AID/pdf/vol19no5.pdf

Upside, you can almost always cure both problems, heat gain and voltage drop with a larger gauge wire in the extension cord.

For what it is worth, I have a 240 volt/ 10 amp, capacitor run/ capacitor start , service factor 1.2 and insulation rating of h, 1750 rpm motor on my splitter, replacing the gas engine. It works better than the gas engine. It spins the pump at only half the speed of the gas engine, with lower gpm and slightly slower ram speed, but the torque is much higher so I bumped the pressure relief to 3000 psi. There is no heating of the hydraulic oil as there was with the former gas engine. But you need a 10 gauge extension cord. Two fifty footers (connected to 30 amp outlet, like your drier) give you a hundred feet of leash without any problems around your wood workup area. A generator runs the splitter, the radio and lights to work at night in the woods.
 
Dont forget to WAV to the people. W=AV, yes you are right.

1500W / 120V = 12.5 amps.

Most house outlets are rated at 15A. If the outlet is 14 gauge wiring and the breaker is 15A, youre good to go. 12 gauge and a 20A breaker, even better. A 100' 12 Gauge extension cord is rated for 15A. As for the grounding, it should be done through the house wiring/extension cord. As for "Differential switch", im sure that is referring to a GFCI outlet which monitors differences in the outgoing/incoming voltage and will trip if they are different. And of course, your exterior outlet is GFCI protected now isnt it........
 
EJL923 said:
Dont forget to WAV to the people. W=AV, yes you are right.

1500W / 120V = 12.5 amps.

Most house outlets are rated at 15A. If the outlet is 14 gauge wiring and the breaker is 15A, youre good to go. 12 gauge and a 20A breaker, even better. A 100' 12 Gauge extension cord is rated for 15A. As for the grounding, it should be done through the house wiring/extension cord. As for "Differential switch", im sure that is referring to a GFCI outlet which monitors differences in the outgoing/incoming voltage and will trip if they are different. And of course, your exterior outlet is GFCI protected now isnt it........
Click to expand...

Oh, thanks very much.

I have no idea how the outlet is wired, what the amperage is of the breakers or what GFCI even means. Sigh.

Is this stuff likely to be labled anywhere? The members of the family who owned this house before me who might possibly remember such things are either dead or moved to parts unknown. I really, really hate to have to pay an electrician to figure this out if I don't have to. It's a very old house, but the circuit breaker box in the cellar looks pretty new, as does the almost outside outlet (it's on the wall of the house but inside an attached enclosed woodshed).
 
you need to make sure the ckt can handle the load. 80% of breaker size is a good rule. also wire should be sized from motor to breaker at 125% of FLA on nameplate. all of this stuff is easy to do as long as your equipt with good info. hiring an elec can be expensive but it is usually worth it. ive done alot of work for people who say " i should have just called you in the first place." Grounding of the unit is mearly to protect "you" should there be an equipt fault. this is most likely a liability driven statement but is a good idea. jumper cables and an 8 dollar ground rod from HD could save your ass.
 
If calling an electrician is not your thing, i will give my best advice. If you can locate the breaker the outlet is on, and it is a 15A or higher, then you can assume you are good to go. If it is a somewhat modern house, chances are good it is at least 14 gauge which should handle the load. You happen to know if its knob and tube or romex wiring? If its romex, it should be at least 14 gauge. You must have a friend/family member who knows enough about this stuff to dtermine what you have? You definately need to have a GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) outlet on any outlet exposed to the elements, even inside a woodshed attached to the house. A GFCI outlet will have two little buttons which say test and reset located between the top and bottom outlet. This will help protect you when using electronics in wet locations, i.e snow. I personally wouldnt use any power tool outside if it wasnt plugged into a GFCI outlet. Now if it is not, Lowes and HD sell a GFCI outlet which plugs into a regular outlet. This is a suitable alternative for your protection. I only say that because it sounds you are not the home handyman electrican type. A GFCI outlet is fairly easy to install. Im not an electrician, but an engineer. i just bought a foreclosed home and am bringing everything up to code, i always go by my copy of the National Electric Code. Just letting you know i am not just pulling facts out of my...
 
EJL923 said:
If calling an electrician is not your thing, i will give my best advice. If you can locate the breaker the outlet is on, and it is a 15A or higher, then you can assume you are good to go. If it is a somewhat modern house, chances are good it is at least 14 gauge which should handle the load. You happen to know if its knob and tube or romex wiring? If its romex, it should be at least 14 gauge. You must have a friend/family member who knows enough about this stuff to dtermine what you have? You definately need to have a GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) outlet on any outlet exposed to the elements, even inside a woodshed attached to the house. A GFCI outlet will have two little buttons which say test and reset located between the top and bottom outlet. This will help protect you when using electronics in wet locations, i.e snow. I personally wouldnt use any power tool outside if it wasnt plugged into a GFCI outlet. Now if it is not, Lowes and HD sell a GFCI outlet which plugs into a regular outlet. This is a suitable alternative for your protection. I only say that because it sounds you are not the home handyman electrican type. A GFCI outlet is fairly easy to install. Im not an electrician, but an engineer. i just bought a foreclosed home and am bringing everything up to code, i always go by my copy of the National Electric Code. Just letting you know i am not just pulling facts out of my...
Click to expand...

You're right, I do not do serious electrical stuff DIY. Calling an electrician very much IS my thing, but like everybody else, I'm reluctant to spend the $$ just to find out something I could have found out for myself. Also this splitter (and other models in the same class) was advertised as running on ordinary household current.

It's a very old house, but the old knob-and-tube was replaced some time ago by the previous owners, but the precise capacity wasn't conveyed to me, I assume because it's standard stuff.

The woodshed is entirely enclosed, dry and protected (with a metal roof), and since my house is way out in the countryside, there's no doubt the previous owners used various power tools plugged into the outlet. It doesn't have those little test buttons, though. I will take your exellent advice, though, and get a plug-in GFCI.

I just remembered (Duh!) I actually do have a friendly neighbor who's a retired electrical engineer and has done a lot of electrical work on his own house over the years, so I'll see if I can lure him over here to have a look.

Thanks very much (and everybody else here) for all the good and patient advice. It's very much appreciated.
 
So, how does it work? Are you happy with the power and cycle time, or is it not quite what you hoped for?
 
WarmInIowa said:
So, how does it work? Are you happy with the power and cycle time, or is it not quite what you hoped for?
Click to expand...

I've been working on a review to post here, so far only in my head! But I will do it shortly.

Since I have nothing to compare it to directly, other than a few turns at a neighbor's enormous old gasoline splitter, I'm hesitant to evaluate it in those terms. But yes, I'm happy with it-- not delirious, but I wasn't expecting to be delirious about a 4-tonner for 250 bucks.

It certainly has all the power I need for splitting down the super-large splits (ie, 10, 12 inches or more), although only 14 inches long, that have been causing me such grief this winter. It's a great pleasure to see it work its will on a nasty big twisty knotted chunk of beech, I must say. I've only had it fail a few times, and each time, backing up, readjusting the split and going at it again has done the trick. How well it would cope with big rounds at the limit of its specs I don't know, but I think it would depend on how straight the grain was of the wood. I've got some fairly large rounds of rock maple languishing at the front of my property I'm meaning to try it on when the weather warms up and I can unstick them from the frozen ground they're stuck in right now, but I suspect it will handle those just fine because of the straightness of the grain. It could not, I'm pretty sure, cope with big rounds of something like beech. Softer woods I think would be a piece or cake up to a pretty large size.

I'm not 100 percent sure what is meant by "cycle time," but if that's the time it takes from one pass to sit and build up force to be ready for the next, there isn't any. I can do splits as rapidly as I can replace them. If we're talking about the time it takes for the pusher to make its way down to the business end, that's another matter. It's certainly not fast enough to keep me from mentally twiddling my thumbs while I wait. A lot of that is because it's designed to take stuff quite a bit longer than what I'm splitting and the pusher returns to the starting position unless you keep your hand on the lever and take your other hand off the power button. The biggest improvement I'd want to make would be having it be somehow adjustable for the length of the wood you're working with.

One pass at a time, it's certainly slower than hand-splitting, but overall obviously faster than having to give multiple whacks with the maul or bring in the wedge and sledge, not to mention all the bad blows that don't hit square. (My hand-eye coordination sucks big-time, so aim is a problem for me.)

The splitter absolutely, though, does the job I got it to do and has made my winter daily firewood chores a lot easier and somewhat less time-consuming.

Down sides-- it has to hang out in above-freezing temperatures, so the damn thing has to live in my kitchen when I'm not using it. I've used it for a couple hours at a stretch in 10-20 degree temps in my attached woodshed, and had no problems at least that I can tell.

Related is the fact that it's so incredibly heavy-- for me. It's about 100 pounds, and has very small wheels on one end that of course don't touch the ground/floor when it's in operating position. So it has to be hauled up by its handle to be very nearly upright before the stand right in front of those wheels gets out of the way and you can roll it. I'm 5-7, so that's not at all comfortable for me. The wheels/stand alignment also means it gets stuck if it encounters even a small bit of splitting debris and is a major hassle to get over any kind of sill.

I had been thinking I could pull it up to where my stacks are, up a modest incline on my property, to split down stuff in the spring before I stack it, but that's clearly not going to be possible. I also won't be able to hoist it up onto a table or other platform without major help, so have to use it at ground level, which means crouching/squatting, etc., to operate it.

Bottom line is that it really does do what it's advertised to be able to do. I'd suggest looking carefully at the size stuff it's listed to be able to handle and take that seriously. While it does what I need it to do with ease, I don't feel like it's got huge amounts of power to spare, as my neighbor's big gas splitter does. It's definitely a light-duty splitter, but clearly has way more power than any of the light manual splitting devices I've seen advertised (the things where you use a pulley sort of thing to pull the splitting end up a pole and drop it down on the split, for instance).
 
Hi
How come it has to live inside?
Change the oil in it to synthetic and leave it in the shed,will work great in the cold.
Thomas
 
salecker said:
Hi
How come it has to live inside?
Change the oil in it to synthetic and leave it in the shed,will work great in the cold.
Thomas
Click to expand...

I've had conflicting advice on that. Some say that works well, others that it doesn't and can harm the motor. I need this to work without problems, so I'm not taking the chance.

I haven't had a recommendation to do that from anybody who's actually worked with an electric splitter in winter in a cold climate.

Have you? It sure would make life easier than having to haul it in and out of my kitchen!
 
Plug that puppy into a circuit breaker protected by gfci receptical (or gfci breaker is fine). If an extention cord is required use 12/3 extention cord up to 50' beyond 50' 10/3 is needed because of starting current and voltage drop (the cord will act like a heater if too small plus the motor will not want to start).. The risk if you do not follow these instructions is you'll burn out the splitter motor.. I have a 5 ton and it ran ok on a 15 amp. circuit but use the 20 amp when convenient..

Ray
 
gyrfalcon said:
I'm not 100 percent sure what is meant by "cycle time," but if that's the time it takes from one pass to sit and build up force to be ready for the next, there isn't any. I can do splits as rapidly as I can replace them. If we're talking about the time it takes for the pusher to make its way down to the business end, that's another matter. It's certainly not fast enough to keep me from mentally twiddling my thumbs while I wait. A lot of that is because it's designed to take stuff quite a bit longer than what I'm splitting and the pusher returns to the starting position unless you keep your hand on the lever and take your other hand off the power button. The biggest improvement I'd want to make would be having it be somehow adjustable for the length of the wood you're working with.

Down sides-- it has to hang out in above-freezing temperatures, so the damn thing has to live in my kitchen when I'm not using it. I've used it for a couple hours at a stretch in 10-20 degree temps in my attached woodshed, and had no problems at least that I can tell.

Related is the fact that it's so incredibly heavy-- for me. It's about 100 pounds, and has very small wheels on one end that of course don't touch the ground/floor when it's in operating position. So it has to be hauled up by its handle to be very nearly upright before the stand right in front of those wheels gets out of the way and you can roll it. I'm 5-7, so that's not at all comfortable for me. The wheels/stand alignment also means it gets stuck if it encounters even a small bit of splitting debris and is a major hassle to get over any kind of sill.

I had been thinking I could pull it up to where my stacks are, up a modest incline on my property, to split down stuff in the spring before I stack it, but that's clearly not going to be possible. I also won't be able to hoist it up onto a table or other platform without major help, so have to use it at ground level, which means crouching/squatting, etc., to operate it.
Click to expand...

Use a good round as a spacer at the foot of the splitter to make up for the extra length that it's designed for....place a round you want to split against the "spacer" round and stop the wedge before it gets to the spacer....it should split the round you want split with much less travel.

I'm not familiar with the difference between regular and synthetic oil in regards to low temperatures, but remember that it isn't primarily the motor that you're concerned with in cold temps but rather the hydraulic pump and the temperature of the oil inside it...it's got to be fluid enough to do what it does.

As for pulling it, you might want to invest in a sheet of 1/2" plywood and split it length ways...you could lay this down to roll in on...switching positions between the two pieces as the splitter travels (leap-frogging style). Also, if you have something to anchor it to at the top of your hill where the rounds are then you might could pick up a cheap HF come-a-long or a boat winch to pull the splitter up the hill with.

Just some thoughts, best wishes,
Ed
 
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