Electricity is a subject I don’t understand well. I’ve taken several physics classes, and everytime someone mentions volts, wattage, current, power, my mind goes blank. I finally looked everything up and basically understand it; here is a very brief summary.
Part of the reason why electricity seems so mystifying is because you can’t see it. But things such as voltage, current, power, and wattage can be explained by imagining electricity in cables as if it was water flowing in a pipe. Voltage is the “pressure of electricity”, and current is the flow-rate.
Voltage is potential, like a head of a stream, a static pressure of electricity waiting to flow.
Current is measured in amps. If electrons are the atoms of electricity, you’d see six million million million of them flow per second for each amp of current there is. (electrons are very small – many household appliances have several amps as a working current).
Power is easy to work out, as it’s voltage multiplied by current.
But on electricity bills you don’t pay for power, you pay for energy. Energy is power x time. A one kilowatt (1000w) heater running for one hour has used one kilowatt-hour.
> “I’ve taken several physics classes, and everytime someone mentions volts, wattage, current, power, my mind goes blank.”
Same here :-)
Maybe you could enhance this post with:
- is power expressed in watt? So a 3 Amp equipment connected to a 220V socket uses 660 Watt per hour to run?
- what about impedence, positive or negative voltage, phase/neutral/ground, single-phase and three-phase power lines (apparently, big electric machines like professional cooking equipments or elevators require triphase power), AC and DC, why some countries use 110V while others use 220V, what are KVA (when buying uninterruptable power supply/UPS), etc.?
I can supply this information, you could end up #1 in Google with “electricity for dummies” :-)
Cheers
Fred.
s/I can supply/you can supply/ ;-)