that would be the motor homes, on the lane and a half roads, in the mountainshans wrote:better than in the middle
I miss having a motorcycle
that would be the motor homes, on the lane and a half roads, in the mountainshans wrote:better than in the middle
It's convention otherwise, but many of the wiring conventions are stupid. The advantage of third prong up installation is that this way anything falling down the wall onto a loose plug can't hit a hot wire.Doug_Tipple wrote:Of course, I understand that it doesn't matter whether the ground plug is on the top or the bottom of the 3-prong configuration, as long as all of the wires are connected correctly. I'm not too worried about the electricity coming out upside down. To me, it is merely a matter of convention. Similarly, a wall light switch is on when switched upward and off when switched downward. You can easily wire it the other way, but that is not the standard way of doing it. For faucets, the hot water goes on the left and the cold water on the right.
Be sure you set the dial to read the voltage "high", rather than "near", or you could burn up your meter before you can blink. In other words, if you expect to measure 240V, set the meter to read on the 1000V scale, not 200V. Most meters have a AC and a DC scale. Be sure to use the correct one.Denny wrote:thats yes on the multimeter
using volts and
only if you can be sure of your ground
More than one!Denny wrote:so how many have ya melted Chuck?
The difference between the neutral and the ground is that the ground is grounded in your house. The neutral is grounded somewhere, but there can be a substantial and variable voltage between the neutral and ground. When I was in graduate school, some boneheaded professor, for reasons that were never apparent to anyone presumably including himself, tied the neutrals in his lab to the building ground. It took several of us with sensitive equipment a few days to figure out that the building ground had been floated, i. e., was no longer earth ground. So for some time there were about half a dozen pipes pounded into the ground outside various labs, and we had to run copper braids from our labs out to our own "personal" grounds and electrically isolate our equipment from the building.s1m0n wrote:North American household current is 110v 60 hz AC. Historically, plugs were like this:
Which work either way you stick it into the socket. In the sixties or early 70s we got three-prong plugs like these
The round prong is a dedicated ground wire. This is still in use for higher power and utility devices.
In the 80s we started getting these:
..where the prongs differ because one is grounded. They're not as safe as a three-prong plug, but they're safer than option one because appliances that have a polarized plug are designed so that any short is supposed to go straight to ground via the neutral wire. It made no sense with my reversing river model, because with it each wire is equal. Like a lot of people, I did my share of cutting off the wides prongs to adapt new equipment to older plugs and extension cords. My new model says that sometimes the hot wire pushes and sometimes it sucks, but it is always the one in charge.
I was more into diodes.....spalpeen wrote:More than one!Denny wrote:so how many have ya melted Chuck?
I like the way they SNAP when you let the magic smoke out. But for real fun, try an electrolytic capacitor!Denny wrote:I was more into diodes.....spalpeen wrote:More than one!Denny wrote:so how many have ya melted Chuck?