In alt.engineering.electrical operator jay wrote:
|
| "You" wrote in message
| ...
| In article ,
|
| wrote:
|
| There are two different flavors of 220/230/240 volts. Some places
| have a
| simple system with one wire hot and one wire grounded. Other
| places have
| a split system where the voltage is split in half to get
| 110/115/120 volts
| relative to ground, by adding a additional "middle" conductor that
| is the
| grounded one.
|
| Sonny, you need to LEARN the difference between Ground and
| Neutral......
| before you spout any further BS.......
|
| What he wrote looks reasonable to me in terms of ground and neutral.
| Neutral is the grounded conductor where I live. He does not say to
| use a ground as a neutral, if that's what you're getting at. I can
| only guess that that may be what you're getting at, you haven't really
| said.

He might be one of those "knows just enough to be really dangerous" people
on the net. I didn't even mention "neutral". My intent was to explain it
in a simpler way for someone to just understand the basic difference. The
term "middle" was to convey a little more information than "neutral" would
have ... for the targeted audience.

There were two reasons Edison used a split system. One was to get the
advantage of less voltage drop and/or longer wires. The other was to run
the light bulbs on a lower voltage, which he knew makes them more reliable.

If he had not been fixated on DC, and had simply accepted AC early on, he
might well have discovered that an even lower voltage made the bulbs even
more reliable, and that a step down transformer at each building would have
done the job reliably, and also allow him to distribute at a higher voltage.
For example, he could have distributed at 600 volts and stepped down to 30
volts inside each building (maybe on a floor by floor basis). OTOH, he could
have run a DC motor-generator to get a lower voltage, too (though it would
have been less reliable than a transformer on AC). Had the light bulb voltage
issue not been a factor, he might well have simply run a straight 2-wire 220
volt system.

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