In alt.engineering.electrical SQLit wrote:

| Circuits are determined by load. In residential load calculating, a breaker
| will generally 80% supply of the rating on the breaker. Example, a 15 amp
| circuit is considered to be maxed out at 1440 watts.

I remember in my college dorm, the receptacle circuits were divided out
serving 3 walls each. That is, 3 rooms would be split across 2 circuits.
The end rooms of a set would be entirely on a single circuit. The middle
room of a set would have half on one, half on the other. Lights were on
another bunch of circuits.

For quite a while, the room with the circuit breaker panels was left
unlocked (as side door entered through the laundry room). When a breaker
got tripped, people would just go in and reset them. Apparently there
was some abuse, and the door was eventually locked. The RA had the key.
But the RA on my floor was too often not willing to go reset the breakers
very quickly, and that was getting some people upset. He was blaming
them for running too much stuff (which is partly true). Anyway, it turns
out my room is next to the RA's room, and half of my receptacles are on
the same circuit as all of his. So what I would do to help out was short
the circuit in my room that was shared with his, and that would get him
to finally get off his butt and go to the breaker room and reset things.

--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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