"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...

"apa" wrote in message
om..

I was talking to an electrician doing some work in my building and
started asking some questions about AC. My electrical knowledge is
quite limited, but in the course of the conversation, I said something
about the the flow of current reversing direction twice every 60th of
a second. He said "No, the ACTUAL current always flows in one
direction from the hot to the neutral and it's the AMOUNT of current
flowing that alternates." Isn't that the definition of modulated DC,
not AC? I couldn't make any sense of his explanation of what he meant
by "actual current", but he insisted that current flows in ONE
DIRECTION ONLY. I really don't get what he's talking about - but he's
the professional. Can someone fill me in?



** He is using "electrician's logic".

The "hot" wire is the one with electricity in it because it can give him
a
shock while the neutral has no electricity in it because it does not.
Therefore the electricity flows from the hot to the cold - just like heat
does - in only one direction.

............ Phil


I have found that Electricians who have gone through the apprentice schools
do, as Phil suggests, use a different way of describing the phenomenon of
electrical current flow. In several conversations with journeyman
electricians I've come to believe that their way of thinking about
electrical circuits serves them well for wiring buildings and adhering to
electrical codes. But, for those of us who learned our electrical theory
from an electonic perspective, its hard to communicate. For instance, I was
trying to convince an electrician that from an electrical potential
perspective, the neutral and ground were identical, barring a small
potential difference brought about by the resistance of the "grounding
neutral" wire that connects neutral in the switch box to earth ground. He
simply couldn't accept that they were the same in any way, even if the
measured potential difference were zero. To him, the neutral and the
'grounding neutral' had different jobs to do and, therefore, were different.
For him, one is the white wire and the other is not; ergo, different. The
fact that the copper of one was connected to the copper of the other made no
difference. There simply is not much room for deductive reasoning about
electrical realities in electrician's school, and, I guess, its better that
way.

Steve King