On Sat, 26 May 2018 22:53:23 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote:

On Sat, 26 May 2018 18:01:24 -0700, wrote:

On Sat, 26 May 2018 12:11:44 -0500, Terry Coombs
wrote:

On 5/26/2018 11:53 AM, wrote:
On Sat, 26 May 2018 05:41:56 -0000 (UTC), James Waldby
wrote:

On Fri, 25 May 2018 17:38:09 -0700, etpm wrote:
On Fri, 25 May 2018 08:40:22 -0700 (PDT), "Dave, I can't do that" wrote:
I have a 1-1/2HP, 220v motor running from the dryer socket, all good.
...
The house wiring uses the 3-wire 110-0-110 for the 220/240 but the gen
has three pins for the 240-out. I am guessing one is Ground and the
others are Neutral and 240v.
...
The reason neutral wires are called that is because they are tied to
ground in the breaker panel which means there is no potential voltage
between the neutral wire and the ground wire, at least in the breaker
panel. So there is no neutral on the generator unless [...]
"The reason neutral wires are called that is because they are tied to
ground" seems to me to be incorrect. True, in US wiring, neutral wires
usually have near-ground voltages on them, but more generally a neutral
wire is one with no current flowing in it when a system is in balance.
In US wiring the neutral CAN have current running through it.
Eric

* In a properly balanced load center that current will be minimized ...
so I corrected your statement .
Greetings Terry,
Maybe you can educate me a little. After reading posts in reply to
my post I got out the amp clamp and measured the current on both wires
of the 125 volt receptacles in my shop. Plugging in a motor and
turning it on the meter shows the same current draw on both the
neutral and hot wires.In this case approximately 2.8 amps. I wired my
shop with wire ways so it is easy to make measurements as the wire way
covers come off easily and the wires just lay in the wire way.
All the 125 volt receptacles on one wall are fed from the same
breaker, on another wall another breaker, and so on. I did balance the
load in the breaker panel so that two walls are fed from one leg of
the 250 volt supply and two walls from the the other leg.
I don't understand how the neutral can be balanced and show less
current than the hot except at the breaker panel where the power comes
in. What am I missing? What don't I understand?
I did wire the shop myself but I was helped by a licensed
electrician, the electrical code book, and the wiring was inspected
and bought off by a particularly picky inspector.
Thanks,
Eric
The neutral of a 120/240 circuit is a SHARED neutral.
From the point where the 2 branch circuits join, a balanced circuit
neutral carries no current.
Yes - every branch circuit neutral carries current, but if the load
L1 to neutral and L2 to neutral are exactly equal in both current and
power factor, there is no current flow in the shared neutral.

Take a transformer with a center tapped secondary and put the same
load on each side of the secondary.

Lets say it is a center tapped 24 volt secondary - with 12 volts on
each side of center.
Put 12 ohms across each side. You get 1 amp flowing through each load
to the center tap. You get one amp total current in the secondary - so
what current is flowing in the center tap?
ZERO.

There can be NO OTHER ANSWER.
I got a little confused because the 125 volt loads in my shop are
almost never balanced. BTW, the reason I wrote 125 and 250 volts is
because that's what the voltage measures to my shop. Sometimes surges
higher too. PSE says it's all good. All my CNC machine controls have
multi tapped transformers so the high voltage is OK for the controls
but one machine has a VFD that can't handle the voltage spikes and
shuts down. When decelerating the spindle the energy is fed back into
the incoming power and this also causes voltage spikes. I had to wire
in two buck transformers to lower the 3 phase voltage for the one
machine to fix the problem.
Eric