Why did North America not use 220v

[MolaKule]

You are actually paying for Energy.

A Watt is in Joules/s or Energy per second.

A Watt-Hour is J/s X 3600s is 3600 Joules of Energy.

A Kilo-Watt.hour (kW.h) is simply 1,000 times the above or 3.6 Mega Joules.

Not to be confused with the 1.2 JigaWatts Flux Capacitor.

 

[friendly_jacek]

Originally Posted By: 901Memphis
https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/in...24035420AAgWBQ6


Good explanation, thanks. I also always wondered why US outlets are way down near the floor level while the Euro standard is at your belt line more or less. No need to bend over to plug in/out, duh!

 

[bvance554]

Originally Posted By: MolaKule
You are actually paying for Energy.

A Watt is in Joules/s or Energy per second.

A Watt-Hour is J/s X 3600s is 3600 Joules of Energy.

A Kilo-Watt.hour (kW.h) is simply 1,000 times the above or 3.6 Mega Joules.

Not to be confused with the 1.2 JigaWatts Flux Capacitor.

Yes, we're paying for energy. What we're talking about is how the energy is delivered to our home. Its not some under handed scheme contrived by the man to get rich and keep us common folk down.

 

[kschachn]

Actually it's not a little safer, it's a lot safer.

Originally Posted By: Dave Sherman
In the context of the original thread title, I thought it was because Edison's original 110 volt DC system still had tons of electric lights that would work fine at 110 AC, so it didn't make sense to convert to 220 and have to replace them. I believe 110 was also thought to be a little safer than 220.

 

[expat]

Originally Posted By: Pablo
Not sure where you guys live, but my house has 240V and 120V. Most everything by count is now very efficient on 120V and where not, then I use 240V. 240V doesn't make all that much sense to step down to power by cell phone charger, for example.

Anyway I defer to Shannow on this subject.


I'm no Shannow but I understand that we in NA get 240v by using two, out of Phase 120v's and a shared neutral if we want to split them.
Whereas most of the rest of the world get their 240v on a two wire system (1/3 less copper)

How this applies with regard to the appliance (be it a heater or a power tool) I have no idea.

Would I be able to run a European power saw on North American 240v by using the two hot wires?? What about a water heater?

3 Phase (I understand) is 120v x 3 wires out of Phase. How the 3 all get out of phase, I don't know

 

[kschachn]

We're actually paying for power right?

Originally Posted By: MolaKule
You are actually paying for Energy.

A Watt is in Joules/s or Energy per second.

A Watt-Hour is J/s X 3600s is 3600 Joules of Energy.

A Kilo-Watt.hour (kW.h) is simply 1,000 times the above or 3.6 Mega Joules.

Not to be confused with the 1.2 JigaWatts Flux Capacitor.

 

[expat]

Originally Posted By: kschachn
Actually it's not a little safer, it's a lot safer.

Originally Posted By: Dave Sherman
In the context of the original thread title, I thought it was because Edison's original 110 volt DC system still had tons of electric lights that would work fine at 110 AC, so it didn't make sense to convert to 220 and have to replace them. I believe 110 was also thought to be a little safer than 220.


Please explain.

I personally have been jolted by several thousand volts on quite a few occasions.
Not pleasant, but it's amps that really screw you.

 

[Tony05]

Originally Posted By: bepperb
The above article is better than any comment here. To put it short in the US 220/240volts nominal IS supplied to your panel the same way as the rest of the world (frequency varies all around the world) it's just we have the ability to cut that in half with a center tap neutral. The benefit being backwards compatibility and it doesn't require twice the wire to carry the load. The disadvantage being an additional wire from transformer to building.

Getting shocked by 110 isn't as bad as your mom told you. Thankfully I've never experienced 220, and given the choice I'd rather not experience either again. What's more dangerous about getting shocked is either falling off a ladder or another secondary/complication injury, or not being able to remove yourself from the situation before you are burnt.


I always thought their 220 was one hot one neutral. Not like our two hots or two hots and a neutral. Not for sure on that.

He is right. That is what make 277v light so dangerous. Change a ballast hot and the ladder fall out and you are on the floor. Not to go off topic w/277v.

Statistically 120 is the biggest killer. Not 240, 277, or 480. Don't know the source of that but I heard it over and over in apprenticeship class years ago.

 

[OneEyeJack]

Originally Posted By: KenO
Basically, because Edison was a hard-core egomaniac, and a complete douchenugget. And tried to 1-up Tesla (and was usually wrong in the end, nearly every single time) at every chance he could.


Edison had a big campaign to discredit a/c. I was shocked to see the videos of him electrocuting animals in public displays with a/c to prove his point. The one of the elephant is difficult to watch. The animal suffered a long time with jolt after jolt until it finally died. The one of the horse is difficult as well. Edison can be seen jumping for joy and clapping his hands while they jolt the horse several times until it dies. There is something very wrong with someone like that.

 

[eljefino]

Edison liked DC because it had a practical transmission limit of two miles, so in his mind there'd be an "Edison plant" if not several in every town, making him filthy rich.

Westinghouse convinced someone to let him run AC the 20 miles from his Niagra Falls generator to civilization.

 

[Rick in PA]

Originally Posted By: expat
Originally Posted By: kschachn
Actually it's not a little safer, it's a lot safer.

Originally Posted By: Dave Sherman
In the context of the original thread title, I thought it was because Edison's original 110 volt DC system still had tons of electric lights that would work fine at 110 AC, so it didn't make sense to convert to 220 and have to replace them. I believe 110 was also thought to be a little safer than 220.


Please explain.

I personally have been jolted by several thousand volts on quite a few occasions.
Not pleasant, but it's amps that really screw you.


There's the matter of your skin's resistance. A lower voltage, like 12 volts DC in a car cannot conduct serious current through your skin. Anything up to about 48 volts (I think) is considered "low voltage".

The higher the voltage, the more current it can pass through the skin's resistance. That's why thousands of volts can really wack you.

Skin resistance is also the reason water and electricity is so dangerous. Water, moisture, sweat, greatly reduces skin resistance and allows more current to pass.

You lose muscle control at about 5 to 10 milliamps (0.010 amps). That's when you can lock on, not be able to release, and die.

 

[javacontour]

Actually, we pay for Kilowatts, not amps.

Another term for Watt is the Volt-Amp or Volts times Amps.

It doesn't matter if you use an hour of 110v at 2A current or 220v at 1A current, you use the same amount of power.

Originally Posted By: Chris142
we dont pay for electricity. we pay for amps used.110v -120v uses nearly 2x the amps that 220-240 uses.they can charge us more and make more profit.

 

[Shannow]

OneEyeJack,
yep, Edison's behaviour was disgusting...he had to get dirty to discredit the vastly superior AC system. If DC had won (which it could never have), power, copper, space, etc. would all have been wasted, and maintenance costs for everything electrical that rotates would have been forever high (imagine replacing brushes on your fridge, AC etc.

Superior in terms of :
* AC uses a rotating "magnet" (rotor) inside a coil (stator), with the electrical power taken out of the stator. No commutator and brushes is necessary.
* Alternating Current can be stepped up/down as necessary, through the use of transformers. The current is inversely proportional to the voltage for a given power.
* Power losses through conductors are related to the current, so you can reduce power losses over long distances by increasing the voltage, and reducing the current...you can then step it back down again to something usable at the other end. (500,000V is as high as my state goes)
* Polyphase (usually 3 phase) have three phases of nominal voltage (phase to neutral), operating 120 degrees out of phase...that means that with a balanced three phase load, the neutral current will be zero...when you see transmission lines across the country, there are only three BIG wires. Earths will be smaller, and often use the Earth itself.
* In connection with the previous point, you have two options for voltage. Phase to Neutral, and phase to phase. Oz is 240 (230V) AC for home power outlets (phase to neutral), and you have the option if 415 (400V) three phase (phase to phase)...if you have a well equipped garage, you can order a 3 phase installation (three wires and a neutral), with a meter on each phase...parts of the house, and loads will be off each phase to balance, and loads like a lathe, kiln etc. using three phase.
* Older Oz places, they only supplied an active...the neutral/earth was supposed to be at earth voltage anyway.
* Motors can be connected differently on three phase rather than single...on three phase, you can have a star connected motor, with three windings, each running to a common neutral, or "delta" with three phases phase to phase...can have switchgear to connect them "star delta" which starts in star, then switches to Delta...softer take-off.
* You can fake three phase in the garage by connecting a single 240 across one phase of a three phase motor, then giving the motor a spin...it will run, and induce voltage/current in the other two...240V 10 amps (standard outlet) means I can run a 2.5 horse compressor.
* Has zero volts twice per cycle...helps in extinguishing arcs, and loosening locked on muscles.

AC has some disadvantages
* particularly, capacitance and inductance change the power factor (push the voltage and current out of phase), which reduces the actual power that can be transmitted for a given voltage...and provides great conspiracies about compact fluorescent lights. (capacitors,inductors, and the generating units themselves can correct this 'though).
* the above do some really weird things, e.g. if you have a high voltage line that runs a hundred miles, and is energised at one end, the "loose" end that you want to connect the next town to can have much, much higher voltage than is allowed (Ferranti effect), meaning that the other end can't be energised...transformers have "taps" which take the electricity out at various points in the coil to provide lower volts, or higher, depending on whether energising, or loading up a line...also, transmission lines cross phases (look at a three phase 1,000 volt line in a rural area, and the wires will be shuffled in position regularly, to try to stop this.

Oddities that are neither advantage or disadvantage.
* Every electrical generator or synchronous load are in lock step with each other on the grid...they turn all together at exactly the same speed and phase.
* which is great, because every load will cause all of them to pick up a little load
* which is bad because they can all drag the entire grid down together on a bad day (rare)...sometimes big DC interconnectors are used to break this up.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Rick in PA
There's the matter of your skin's resistance. A lower voltage, like 12 volts DC in a car cannot conduct serious current through your skin. Anything up to about 48 volts (I think) is considered "low voltage".

The higher the voltage, the more current it can pass through the skin's resistance. That's why thousands of volts can really wack you.

Skin resistance is also the reason water and electricity is so dangerous. Water, moisture, sweat, greatly reduces skin resistance and allows more current to pass.

You lose muscle control at about 5 to 10 milliamps (0.010 amps). That's when you can lock on, not be able to release, and die.


In my state, for industrial stuff
EXTRA low voltage 50V AC, 120V DC
High Voltage 1,000V AC, 1,500V DC
Low Voltage in the middle.

These are WHandS stuff, not whether you want to get tangled with them.

AC also has a nasty skin effect, in that when it gets bad enough, the current travels through the surface and not the core...can blow your dangly bits off, and not kill you.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: expat
3 Phase (I understand) is 120v x 3 wires out of Phase. How the 3 all get out of phase, I don't know

Single phase is a single rotating magnet in a coil...

Look down a shaft, and place a magnet across it, so North is up, south is down. Have a coil arranged going in and out of page. Rotate magnet, and as the field crosses the coil you get a sin wave voltage current, on a single "phase".

Spin the shaft at 3,600 RPM, and you've got a single phase 60Hz.

Make another two phases, and mount them at 120 degrees from each other, do the same, and there's 3 phase.

 

[eljefino]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
OneEyeJack,
yep, Edison's behaviour was disgusting...he had to get dirty to discredit the vastly superior AC system. If DC had won (which it could never have), power, copper, space, etc. would all have been wasted, and maintenance costs for everything electrical that rotates would have been forever high (imagine replacing brushes on your fridge, AC etc.


Some of the big power companies still sell or until recently sold ~600 VDC to subway authorities... for example Boston's MBTA. There would be a nondescript substation, made up to look like a house, where an AC motor spun a DC dynamo or where they used those cool mercury bulb things.

 

[Shannow]

Mercury arc rectifiers !!!

Cool, I've only ever seen them decommissioned (still full), never running.

 

[eljefino]

not my photo but I too would like to see one humming along.

 

[friendly_jacek]

Originally Posted By: friendly_jacek
I also always wondered why US outlets are way down near the floor level while the Euro standard is at your belt line more or less. No need to bend over to plug in/out, duh!


Is anyone going to answer this, or do I need to open a separate thread?

 

[supton]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
* the above do some really weird things, e.g. if you have a high voltage line that runs a hundred miles, and is energised at one end, the "loose" end that you want to connect the next town to can have much, much higher voltage than is allowed (Ferranti effect), meaning that the other end can't be energised...


Had to look that one up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_effect
Sounds like the transmission line is long enough to act as, well, a transmission line, and actually does a voltage step up. Always wondered if the power lines did run into those effects too or not. I guess they do!

*

Looking at the link:
https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AibSLNiBCjSZBLJRw5AXA2cgBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20070624035420AAgWBQ6
I see this:
Quote:
after world war two, European regulators established 240V(50 Hz, to fit better with the metric system)

Which I don't understand. 50 is a nicer number to work with, but if it was me I'd just pick a nice binary number, so one could divide using simple counters to make 1Hz for clocks and other things needing a clock reference. 32 is probably too slow (may see flicker in light bulbs), 64 would be a good number, and 128 probably not too bad, although skin effect would likely mean yet even more power loss on the really long transmission lines.

*

I believe the UK (Europe too?) has lower voltage bulbs for drop lights etc. Want to say 55V. One nice feature, not so important today, is that lower voltage bulbs use thicker filaments which are more shock resistant.

*

I find it somewhat ironic today that, for anything electronic, and for an increasing number of even large electric motors, the first thing that happens to the power coming into the item is rectification. Generate high voltage DC, then buck to whatever DC level is required. Chop as necessary to run PWM to a motor even. Means that dirty DC power ought to run most anything. Anything not using a simple AC motor across the line, that is.

Yes, I realize that AC works well with simple step up/down transformers. [But AC lines do suffer from skin effect, so a DC line ought to have less line losses. Worse arc issue though, no self quenching available when the voltage crosses zero, so harder on relays. Not sure about impact on solid state relays though.] But sometimes I wonder if Edison isn't have a last laugh at times. Even if he was simply wrong in his arguments.