201–210 of 213 posts
Truly amazing craftsmanship, right there. Infrastructure that's backwards -and forwards - compatible. Unhackable, able to run for decades or centuries at a time.
I yearn for the analog.
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They're treated with something called creosote which if it touches your clothes you must burn them. They'll last a good long time though.
Can you elaborate or provide a source for being required to burn your clothes after touching creosote?
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220V isn't very high in the power world. The US has 765 KV. I'm not sure what the highest voltage cable in the world is, but now I'm curious.
IIRC, my college power professor said that Russian transmission lines carried 1 million volts, whereas US transmission lines only carry half a million volts.
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They're treated with something called creosote which if it touches your clothes you must burn them. They'll last a good long time though.
Can you elaborate or provide a source for being required to burn your clothes after touching creosote?
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Thanks! Can I suggest that you might enjoy following my blog regularly? In addition to utility poles, I have also discussed this year: Samuel Johnson's feud with James Macpherson, a fraudulent poet; the panicked history of England in 1533 after Henry VIII's mistress got pregnant; the Slaughter electric needle injector; how plutonium is used to power medical devices; equivalents of "Joe Blow" in Turkish and Hebrew. Al…
Why do you denigrate your own work so often, though? Most of the time, when someone posts your articles, you reply "does this guy ever shut up" or "this post sucks".
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Thanks! Can I suggest that you might enjoy following my blog regularly? In addition to utility poles, I have also discussed this year: Samuel Johnson's feud with James Macpherson, a fraudulent poet; the panicked history of England in 1533 after Henry VIII's mistress got pregnant; the Slaughter electric needle injector; how plutonium is used to power medical devices; equivalents of "Joe Blow" in Turkish and Hebrew. Al…
I realize this may be a silly question, but how do I follow your blog? Is there an email subscription? Do I need some app to access your RSS feed? I feel like this should be easier to solve than it is. (:
Probably other browsers have something similar, either built-in or supplied as a plugin.
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While the second half of your comment is correct: >> The electrical outlets in your home have two power-carrying prongs. >Only one of the prongs carries power. The other is attached to the earth, and is always at zero volts. Voltages are about potential differentials, so "zero volts" is relatively meaningless without context. The neutral line is required by the electric code to be connected to earth at the electric p…
> Both prongs absolutely carry power. Both carry current . But not power. Power is volts * amps, and the neutral is defined as zero volts (if you ignore the voltage drop). > you can get shocked when working on junction boxes for the neutral line Only from the voltage drop on that wire. It's not the full 120v. (Unless it's cut of course, but that's a whole different story.) > Here you use voltages as a relative measur…
What he has already pointed out is that voltage is a relative unit. Zero volts by itself is meaningless. It would be just as correct to say that the hot wire is at zero volts and the neutral wire and the rest of the planet are at 120VAC. Also earlier you mentioned that from phase to phase inside a house was 240v but phase to ground was 208v. This isn't correct and it's simple trigonometry to prove why. You can visualize voltage potential in any polyphase AC system as the distance between points on a circle. Ground is the center of the circle and the individual phase is a point on the circle offset by the phase angle. For a split phase system there is 180 degrees between the two phases and cos(0) - cos(180) gives you the fairly obvious distance of 2x the radius. This means for 120v from phase to ground you get 240v phase to phase. In a three phase system there's 120 degrees between phases so if you have 120v from phase to ground you have (cos(0)-cos(120))*120v=208v. For what you're saying to be possible you would need 98.85 degrees between phases which is obviously not a nice integer division of 360 degrees.
As a German I'm always amazed by the ugliness of those power and telephone poles in other countries. There is talk here to also build phone lines with poles in the future as it is cheaper, hope this never happens.
Phone lines? Are line phones still so popular in Germany that it even requires network expansion? In my country copper lines are basically left to rot as line phones are being replaced by cell/IP phones rapidly. In some cases people living in remote areas were issued free cell phones, because it was cheaper than repairing old copper lines.
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I think New Zealand is the same as Australia with 5 wires: the 3 phases, neutral (the central return wire) and earth. Grabbing a random location in Auckland off Street View shows 5 wires: https://goo.gl/maps/wz1W73uWAiz
Depends on where you are in the country. Here's some 3 wire I found by dropping a random pin: https://goo.gl/maps/MkoiprJ1gWM2 I've always remembered it being 3 pin around where I grew up.
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The two hot wires are perfectly out of phase, so connecting to both of them gives you 240V outlets (used for large appliances like clothes dryers). Your standard 120V appliance outlets are only using a single phase and neutral. IIRC the smaller prong is hot and the larger prong is neutral.
Fun fact - the reason outlets in new construction are installed upside down (ground prong on top) is that the groudn prong can stop this from happening if something falls on it: https://i.redd.it/bm1gqw8hzppz.jpg Of course that's an ungrounded plug so they're in trouble either way, but you get the idea. Another option (which I've never seen in the US) is plugs where the first chunk of the line/neutral prongs are insu…
If you actually look at a NEMA 5 outlet with the ground pin compared to old ungrounded polarized NEMA 1 outlets the NEMA 5 outlet is rotated 180 degrees. The larger neutral slot is on the right on old outlets and with the ground pin down on a NEMA 5 outlet the neutral is on the left.
It's not just for people dropping coins or paper clips on it though. Some outlet covers are metal and if the screw is loose or damaged that's basically guaranteed to short out if something is plugged in with the ground pin on the bottom. Another common thing is people using a tape measure along a wall, it's so thin that if there's a small gap it could shock someone using it or if you're lucky just short against the neutral.