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CaptainBoing

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Joined: 07/09/2016
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 2075

Posted: 09:43am 24 Jun 2020

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I love this guy, has a darkly humorous method of delivery and I have yet to find a vid of his that is either boring or uninformative.

So, hands up everyone who thought the US domestic power system was 110V?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4

SimpleSafeName

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Joined: 28/07/2019
Location: United States
Posts: 319

Posted: 03:33pm 24 Jun 2020

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Me. Parts of it anyways.

Specifically the part that doesn't bite nearly as bad as the next level up at 2x the voltage.

Or, in the case of an industrial plant, the level that bites at 4x the voltage.

Or, in the case of Canada, where you can have parts of the system that can bite at 5x the voltage.

What's up with that Canada? It's not like you don't have your own source of copper:
https://www.miningandenergy.ca/mines/article/top_active_copper_mining_operations_in_canada/

As a fun side note, when I worked for Goodman (we made HVAC units that sold worldwide) we had to test each unit at the voltage that it was going to operate at in its destination country. That meant installing a huge autotransformer to boost the voltage up to the required level (600 volts for Canada).

For the test, the operators would connect the leads from the transformer using alligator clips. How we managed to never kill anyone is still a mystery to me.

As a second fun side note, changing the voltage naturally changes the amount of current that it consumes. Which changes the amount of watts that your heater produces. We measure this wattage to verify that the heater is working properly before shipping it out.

For a batch of units that were going out to South Africa the test was failing because the wattage wasn't measuring correctly. I'm on the other side of the cubicle wall listening to four engineers discussing the problem, when one of our engineers commented "What we need is a way to know what the watts should be".

Really? This guy has twenty years on me and I'm no spring chicken.

I pipe back "There's a formula for that, it's called 'Ohm's law'."

You could have heard a pin drop. :)

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