three Romex sets in ceiling box

[Clare Snyder]

You got it correct. Step to the head of this class.

[Clare Snyder]

Another live wire that is 180 dergrees out of phase.

[Clare Snyder]

Here it is NOT the "taxing authority" - it is the ESA - the "Electrical Safety Authority"

[Clare Snyder]

Arguing with Trader is like wresting with a pig

[Dean Hoffman]

Aren't they talking about that single wire earth return? That must be really rare. I don't remember seeing it anywhere in my little world. EXCEPT for electric fencers to keep livestock in.

[Ralph Mowery]

That is why I try to stay out of it. I just as I thought we would have another 400 postings on the 2 phase thing.

The 2 phase electrical power system is well defined. Any other discussion is just a twist of what the uninformed try to make out of it.

Just as you may say water boils at 212 deg F or 100 deg C. It only does that when under a specific pressure and is pure water.

Water can actually boil over a range of less than room temperature to several humdred degrees depending on how much pressure it is under. even just exposed to the normal air, it will boil at a higher temperature at places lower than sea level and lower temperature at the top of a mountain.

[Clare Snyder]

I believe it MAY still be in use in one of the western states of the USA as well as a small portion of remote rural Saskatchewan, and parts of the Australian outback - but it's use is declining steadily even there. It WAS common in the rural electrification schemes of many areas, but stray voltage issues with livestock, among other concerns, has curtailed ot's use (voltage differential between water lines and ground is a SERIOUS issue)

[devnull]

Yes, water is 3-phase. ;-)

[trader_4]

Figures that you'd weigh in with a stupid ad hominem attack.

Let's review. An obvious troll posted what was clearly a joke about two phase. It was ignored, until YOU took the bait, you were so dumb you not only couldn't see it was a troll but you responded as if it was a serious remark, where it was obviously a joke.

Then later you posted this:

'The primary of the branch transformer is accross ONE phase of the ncoming power,and the secondary is center tapped - providing a "split" phase where each side of the service is

180 degrees out of phase with the other - making the voltage of the two phases additive. "

Which of course is consistent with exactly what I've been saying. Yet you then proceed to attack me, when I agree with you. You're a real piece of work.

[trader_4]

If that's the case, why did you join Clare in taking the bait from an obvious troll? Not only was it a troll, the post was clearly a joke, not serious.

You know you're getting really annoying. You have no technical grounding in this and don't know what you're talking about. We've been polite and reasonable. I tried to explain to you that just because 100 years ago there was *one* example of a two phase power system, that does not define what two phase is. Joe tried to explain it to you too, saying that it's like seeing a propane truck and then insisting that defines what a truck is, that there can be no other trucks. Or saying that because there was an implementation of 3 phase 480V, 60 hz, that defines that 3 phase is and that if you had a system with 3 phases at 400V, 50hz, or with theoretical phase angles other than 120 degrees, that three phases are not still there. If I took that 100 year old 90 deg two phase implementation and move one winding by ten degrees, made it 100 instead of 90 deg, would we still have two phases present? Or would the world collapse into some kind of black hole?

No one disputes that a hundred years ago there was a two phase power system. That has nothing whatever to do with what the service coming into a house looks like, what it is or isn't. I even gave you an IEEE fellow, a professor of electrical engineering with

40 years experience, a guy who consults for power companies as a source where he writes exactly about this issue, saying that 240/120 is really a two phase power source. He gave this paper at a power industry conference and it's published by the IEEE, ie it's been peer reviewed:

Distribution engineers have treated the standard ldquosingle-phaserdquo distribution transformer connection as single phase because, from the primary side of the transformer, these connections are single phase and, in the case of standard rural distribution, single phase line to ground. However, with the advent of detailed circuit modeling, we are beginning to see distribution modeling and analysis being accomplished past the transformer to the secondary, which now brings into focus the reality that standard 120-/240-V secondary systems are not single-phase line-to-ground systems, but they are three-wire systems with two phases and one ground wire. Furthermore, the standard 120-/240-V secondary system is different from the two-phase primary system in that the secondary phases are separated by 180deg instead of three phases separated by 120deg. What all of this means is that analysis software and methods must now deal with an electrical system requiring a different set of algorithms than those used to model and analyze the primary system. This paper will describe the modeling and analysis of the single-phase center-tapped transformer serving 120- and 240-V single-phase loads from a three-wire secondary.

Thanks for helping prove our point. Yes, water will boil at different temperatures depending on the pressure. To apply this to your case, your position is that water can only boil at 212F because water was boiled in Philadelphia in 1920 at 212F, end of story. Inquiring, intelligent minds look at things like that and ask, what if it was at two atmospheres pressure, what would change? would it still boil at

212F? And that's why I've posed those simple questions about your example of two phase power from 100 years ago, to try to get you to look at it logically. to analyze what is there, why it was called two phase and how it relates to 240/120 today. Here are those simple questions again;

Let's take your second example of what you say was the old two phase power, ie 90 deg phase difference, three wires with a common return. I changed the phase difference to 70 deg by rotating one of the windings on the generator. Are there still two phases there? Now I change it to 179 deg, are there still two phases there? I change it to 181, are there still two phases there? I change it to 180 deg, are there still two phases there? And how is the latter any electrically different than the

3 wire 240/120V service going into a home? Describe how I could tell from the panel in your house which of the two I had, the old 90 deg two phase morphed or split-phase and how they are electrically different, how they behave differently?

But sadly neither you nor anyone else on the other side of this will answer those simple questions, for obvious reasons. I've answered all the questions put to me. You can do that when you understand the electrical principles. For some reason, you prefer to wander in the wilderness.

[Commander Kinsey]

Who said it was the taxing authority? And whatever name it is, it's just another nosy / money making government scheme.

[trader_4]

The money typically winds up in the same bucket. I guess Clare is one of those people they have won over with permit fees, registration fees, user fees, etc. instead of calling it a tax.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

No flipping speed will have it in both directions at the same time, which you'd need for 2 phase.

[Jerry T]

[snip]

I'm pointing at my 1996 Honda Accord, "THIS is a car. NOTHING else is." All other cars you see are illusory :-)

[trader_4]

That's totally wrong. Take the scope ground and connect it to the logical system reference point, the neutral. Take one probe and connect it to L1 and take another probe and connect it to L2. Nothing "backwards" there. And you will see two 120V sine wave voltage sources, 180 deg out of phase with each other. It's how you get 240V between them.

[Mark Lloyd]

That sounded funny until I remembered that the word "phase" is also used for the states of matter, such as solid liquid and gas.

[gfretwell]

You keep playing these theoretical games with weird phase angles but the fact is the phases are going to be symmetrical in an alternator. That can be 120 out or 90 out but each one will be the same. 180 out is simply single phase, a straight line if you remember your geometry I am not doing this anymore.

[trader_4]

Say what? In Ralph's two phase example from 100 years ago, there are two phases, one 90 deg off from the other. Nothing symmetric about that. If there are 3 phases, 0, 120, 240, that is symmetric. There is no reqt that phases have to be symmetric to be phases.

And the reason I bring up those "weird" phase angles, is to try to get you to see that 90 deg two phase isn't something unique, it isn't something that defines two phase forever. If you rotate the one winding ten more degrees, you'd have 100 deg phase difference. Are there still two phases there? And when you rotate it to 180, bring it into a house at 120V on 3 wires, then what you have is electrically identical to split-phase from a transformer. You have two 120V AC sources, 180 out of phase with each other. You can't tell them apart.

180 out

Is it only one phase when Ralph's two phase alternator is at 90 deg,

100 deg or 179 deg phase difference? How about at 181? 270? If you want to exclude 180 then it would have to be by definition, otherwise it's just as valid a phase as any of the others. Excluding it would seem rather odd, because then Ralph's alternator would have 120V coming out of one winding, 120v with 180 deg phase difference coming out of the other winding, so if the second one isn't a phase what would you call it?

[Mike Oxbern]

Here are two plots, one at 0 and one at 180 degrees.

Looks like single phase with the second plot having reversed leads.  Looks electrically useless to me.

Would you like to buy a special dual-polarity AA battery?

[gfretwell]

OK so you admit what you see is just an artifact of where you hook up your scope. If I corner ground a delta using exactly the same transformer with exactly the same input you won't see anything "180" out of phase.