I am planning on renting a wirefeed welder. According to the place I will be renting it from, the welder is 120v. I am curious, can I use the 120v welder on a 110v plug, and still be safe?
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19 years ago
120v on 110v?
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19 years ago
On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 19:19:34 -0700 'clevere' wasted 5 lines of text to spew in newsgroup: alt.home.repair
It's the same plug. Voltage will fluctuate throughout the day. The only constant the power company promises 100% accuracy is *frequency*, which in North America is 60 Hz.
-Graham
Remove the 'snails' from my email
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19 years ago
Assuming this is a serious question, yes. Welders are not picky about the supply voltage, and even if they were 120V and 110V (and 117v) are just different terminology for exactly the same thing.
Hope this helps, Bob
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19 years ago
Hi, When voltage sags there is slight drop in freq. as well. Tony
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19 years ago
Frequency from the power company should not change under load (it might if using a generator that bogs down). For inductive loads peak current may be out of phase with peak voltage, but both are the same frequency, just the peaks may be offset from each other.
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19 years ago
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19 years ago
WRONG!!!!
Maybe from a portable generator but not from utilities. Even the smallest of drifts in frequency or phase cause massive blackouts due to interconnected power grids.
gerry
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19 years ago
Well, nothing on this green earth is exact and this includes power line frequency. Back about 30 years ago I was involved with some rotating machinery that was involved in a timing function. I was given the task to find out what the tolerance on the line frequency was. After a bunch of calls to Boston Edison I finally got connected to their engineering department. I was told what the tolerance was at that time for the frequency. (You know I can't remember now so don't ask) I was also told that a major factor in the Great Northeast Blackout in 1965 was the fact that as portions of the grid came under overload, the generators would go out of sync and the grid just collapsed like a house of cards.
Typically, the system loses cycles over the course of the day. It is caught up at night when the load is low.If that did not happen, the standard electric clocks would eventually be wrong.
Charlie
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19 years ago
On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:39:55 GMT 'Tony Hwang' wasted 24 lines of text to spew in newsgroup: alt.home.repair
Nope. You're wrong Tony. If that were true nobody's analog clocks would ever stay synchronized.
-Graham
Remove the 'snails' from my email
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19 years ago
Way back when, before the the electronics age, the local "powerhouses" used to have a large syncronous motor electric clock and a big old "Regulator" style pendulum clock (with second hands on them) next to each other on the wall.
They'd manually tweak the speed of the steam engines driving the generators to keep the electric clock synchronized with the mechanical one.
They used to use light bulbs connected between the outputs of a loaded generator and an idling one to get the phases matched to each other. They'd close the switch to put the idling generator "on line" when the bulbs remained dark for a few seconds.
Jeff
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19 years ago
Doesn't frequency have to do with the way AC is generated, irrespective of voltage, which might vary??
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19 years ago
Jeff, we are contemporaries. In 1953-54 or about I visited a Boston Edison generating facility. No pendulum clock for these folks. Up on the wall was a big analog clock. Nearby was a WWV monitor. The story we got was that starting at midnight they brought the analog clock into agreement with WWV. If you wanted to set your clock at home the recommendation was for about
3am. Don't wait until you get up on the morning, water heaters and stoves coming on line to start the day would drag the line down again.Regards Charlie EE56 xK1ICK
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19 years ago
Damn, I've been wondering about that for years. I finally had a chance to fulfill my quest for knowledge and now it too, is gone. Think, Charlie. Relax your mind and try to remember that day. Recall the papers you wrote. We're all counting on you so don't let us down.
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19 years ago
Hi, I am a retired EE who worked on large scale mainframes for over 30 years. I used to monitor incoming AC for the site with power monitor. I have seen freq. drop(not much half to 1 Hz or so), voltage spikes, sags, blanking out, etc. all the time. Theorywise yes, but in real life, no, it fluctuates little bit. If you don't believe me, go rent a power monitor(now it's all digitally done) and watch it for a few days and see what's going on yourself. Tony
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19 years ago
The specific reason is some generators went of phase and were not disconnected but the protection equipment.
The entire grid must be in sync (including phase) or it fries itself. The original post I replied to claimed local voltage drop will cause frequency changes. That would take down he grid every time.
gerry
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19 years ago
Agreed.The slightest 'out of phase in one section of a large connected network with several generating input points would cause massive fault currents. Protection equipment should then disconnect that section within milliseconds.
What happened during the 'Great blackout' of a few years ago IIRC was that a section of transmission line (In Ohio?) developed a fault and the protection equipment did not at first disconnect it. Also when it was disconnected extra power suddenly took unexpected alternative paths through the US and Canada which caused overloads that disconnected other transmission lines in the US and Canada. Some humans reacted correctly and isolated their areas others did not; no overall plan. So, how many was it? Over 9 million people without power for hours?
I happen to live in an area where we are not connected to the 'North American Electricity network' although our power system is completely standard at 60 hertz and, despite our at times severe weather, very reliable.
But I do recall, in the mid-late 1950s, a peninsula area of one of our provinces which was separately fed by diesel generators, continually overloaded these did 'run slow'. I remember seeing frequency meters at 58 cycles! (Which is about 3% slow!). But since that peninsula network was not connected to anything outside there was no problem, except that electric clocks ran slow (So nobody bought them and it was before the era of cheap battery clocks). Also anything on a record player could sound a little odd!
Anyway a little bit of history and comment.
Cheers.