Main Power Cord

The control panel runs at 240v and will be supplied by a standard 10/4 30A dryer cord.  I do not yet have 220 run at the house and will need to have an electrician out at some point to run it.  I have not decided on a location in my basement yet so it will have to wait.  There will be a dedicated 30A GFCI breaker in the main panel for this circuit.  The connector at the panel is a NEMA L14-30 plug.  Here is what we start with.

NEMA L14-30 connector, Standard 10/4 30A dryer cord, and some 1/2 inch black cable sleeve.

Construction is pretty straight forward.  Cut off the eye terminals on the cable and then I ran the cord through the cable sleeve and secured it with six inches of  3/4 inch heatshrink tubing at each end.  Then attached the plug to the cable.  Here is the finished power cable.

Some people run with 50 or 60 amp circuits.  This will allow them to run 2 5500W elements at the same time.  The jump from 30A to 50 or 60A is quite a bit more money and complicates things a lot also.  The biggest reason I opted for 30A is I can use standard dryer cables and receptacles and I should be able to support it in my 100A service.  Running only 1 element at a time is not really an issue it just may make things take a little bit longer but not by much.