Voltage drop

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You have to see a wire as another resistor placed in series. Instead of this, a

resistance Rload connected to a power supply with voltage V...

You should see it as this, a resistance Rload connected via two wires

with resistance Rwire to a power supply with voltage V:

Now we can use V=I⋅R where V stands for voltage,

I for current and R for resistance.

An example

Let's assume the voltage applied to the circuit is 5V.

Rload equals 250Ω and the resistance Rwire is

2.5Ω (if you don't know the resistance of the wire, see below at "Calculating the

resistance of a wire"). At first, we calculate the current through the circuit using

I=VR:

I=5250+2⋅2.5=5255=0.01961A=19.61mA

Now, we want to know what the voltage drop over one piece of wire is using

V=I⋅R:

V=0.01961⋅2.5=0.049025V=49.025mV

We can also calculate the voltage over Rload in the same way:

V=0.01961⋅250=4.9025V
Anticipating on voltage loss

What if we really need a voltage of 5V over Rload? We will

have to change the voltage V from the power supply so that the voltage

over Rload will become 5V.

At first we calculate the current through Rload:

Iload=VloadRload=5250=0.02A=20mA
Since we're talking about resistances in series, the current is the same in the whole circuit.

Therefore, the current the power source has to give, I, equals Iload. We

already know the total resistance of the circuit:

 R=250+2⋅2.5=255Ω. We can now calculate the needed

voltage supply using V=I⋅R:

V=0.02⋅255=5.1V

Power loss

What if we want to know how much power is lost in the wires? Basically, we use

P=V⋅I, where P stands for power, V for voltage and

I for current.
So the only thing we have to do is fill in the correct values in the formula.

An example

We again use the 5V power supply with a 250Ω

Rload and two wires of 2.5Ω each. The voltage drop over one

piece of wire is, as calculated above, 0.049025V.

The current through the circuit was 0.01961A.

We can now calculate the power loss in one wire:

Pwire=0.049025⋅0.01961=0.00096138W=0.96138mW

Calculating the resistance of a wire

In many cases, we will know the length of a wire l and the AWG (American Wire
Gauge) of the wire, but not the resistance. It's easy to calculate the resistance though.
Wikipedia has a list of AWG specifications available here, which includes the resistance
per meter in Ohms per kilometer or milliOhms per meter. They also have it per kilofeet or
feet.

We can calculate the resistance of the wire Rwire by multiplying the

length of the wire by the resistance per meter.
An example

We have 500m of a 20AWG wire. What will be the total resistance?