24VDC Austrailian Wire Colours

[lphillips]

I have to build a industrial control panel for Austrailia
that has a 24VDC Allen Bradley power supply for use in the PLC,
what are the correct wire colours for 24vdc and 0VDC for
Austrailia?

 

[BobB]

There is no standard wire colour for 24VDC - I use pink for + and violet for - I also see orange for + and black for - try to find out what your customer uses as their standard colours. I do not like black for - as it is the standard colour for 240VAC neutral and is also used regularly for 24VAC 0. Too confusing - that is why I use the colours I use.

 

[ianingram]

We use orange for +, and grey for -, with pink used for anything related to the safety circuit.

We have no real reason to adopt these colours, we just had a customer who had a number of existing panels wired with these colours.

One of our colours had requested that we use "white with a blue stripe" for DC outputs only.... This colour combination was not available at short notice, so we took to some white cable with a blue marker pen .

 

[DwSoFt]

One of our colours had requested that we use "white with a blue stripe" for DC outputs only.... This colour combination was not available at short notice, so we took to some white cable with a blue marker pen .

yeah the last control panel i installed was white with blue stripe for DC - as well

 

[GP2004]

The Australian-made OEM panels I've come across over the years for the most part stick with orange for +24V, but are all over the place with -24V, sometimes also orange, or purple or grey or black or blue...

I would avoid blue (as it's also used as a live phase colour as well as, paradoxically, a neutral colour in flexible leads), and also avoid black for the reason mentioned above. Which reminds me of a call to a fault years ago - a new safety controller requiring a 240VAC supply had its "supply present" LED on but wasn't working properly. It had its neutral (black) connected by "bubba" in maintenance to the first black wire he found in the panel, which was a cable connected to a row of -24VDC DIN terminals. Which is to say 240VAC, limited only by the internal resistance of the controller, was being imposed on the 24VDC circuit that fed quite a few DC timers and devices. Somewhat surprisingly it didn't damage anything.

 

[Helliana]

No idea about Australia, but in the states a lot of folks use Blue for 24+ and Blue with a white stripe for common.

 

[OkiePC]

And more and more you see brown and blue used for +24vdc and dc common respectively, which I think is actually a european standard.

 

[iant]

just a note
the Earth/Ground is Green/Yellow stripe no other colour is allowed.
Also the Black is considered to be an ACTIVE colour.
As far as the ELV (0~50v) the only colour specifications are ccontained in the Scope of the customer and these are often quite different

 

[JERA]

Why not used IEC60204-1 colours, they must also be accepted in Australia​

BLACK: a.c. and d.c. power circuits
LIGHT BLUE: neutral

RED: a.c. control circuits​

BLUE: d.c. control circuits

ORANGE: interlock control circuits supplied from an external power source
GREEN/YELLOW: protective conductor.​

 

[iant]

what you have said JERA is OK but owing to the huge variety of machinery it is also not always the case.
we have our own electrical wiring rules here,` these cover Aust/NZ, as a result the main wire to emphasise it the Earth/Ground wire.
Neutral is considered to be an active conductor, so either Blue, light blue or Black is OK
about 15 years or more ago, Black had to be Neutral unless it was a flexable cable, where it had to be Blue, but not any more.

 

[keithsimpson]

Mainly I've dealt with orange+ and purple-. But what ever you choose, put a colour and description chart in the panel so it is clear what colour is what. Like JERA's post.

Edit: Or ask whoever wants the panel what their standard colours are to keep it the same across the site