Things Your Electrician Wishes You Knew | 25 Amp Circuit Breaker

• Assess your situation: How frequently do you experience power outages? Are they a few hours or overnight? (Most outages usually last only three hours, says Paul Hope, senior home editor for Consumer Reports.) Is your home habitable without power? Could you make it for more than a few hours without heat or air conditioning? How much food do you typically have in the refrigerator and freezer? What’s your level of sanity when there is no power? If it makes you anxious, miserable or just plain nuts to be without electricity, a generator may be better than Xanax.

Well yeah, that’s what I’ve seen, they fail on and stay on until either they or the piece of kit they are running catch fire.

First rule of LO-TO: if you didn’t LO-TO it yourself it’s not! I will never EVER trust anyone to do a LOTO for me. If I’m to stick my hands into something dangerous the key to that lock on the switch is going to be in MY pocket!

In product safety standards all exposed metal parts are “Bonded” to earth grounded. This is so that if an internal line voltage wire was to contact exposed metal parts the circuit breaker would immediately trip and turn off the circuit. Without Earth ground YOU would be a fuse that completes the circuit.

One of the most important rules ever: “Never underestimate your own stupidity.” Knowing perfectly well how to safely power down a circuit / appliance / machine is sadly not sufficient to actually do it, especially so if it has become a repetitive task and there are elements of distraction. If ones life is at stake, there should be check-lists written in stone, just like in aviation.

LOL– I stepped into doo-doo deep enough to over top chest waders, I’m over six feet tall, so that’s deep doo-doo. First I was surprise to learn that the heated beds weren’t heated by line voltage, IMO that’s a no brainer. Appliances across the word use line voltage to produce heat with no shock hazard present when use properly. Getting back to the deep doo-doo. Hackaday does present instruction posts. Line voltage is useful resource that is avoided because of irrational fear. I’m calling irrational because the fear is due to ignorance. I suggest Hackaday create instructional post on how to use line voltage in a way that’s safe to life and doesn’t cause property damage when something goes wrong. Peer reviewed studies and guidelines information is preferred.

Yes you can use those high voltage safely, BUT your typical DIY people don’t even bother to read or understand datasheets. These people need the proper training, but aren’t likely to be bother to go beyond the typical monkey see monkey do watching youtube and think they know it all. I have seen enough of bad layouts of the average projects that doesn’t even understand that the creepage space between the primary and secondary side of an optoisolator aren’t meant to be for routing!

We are a nonprofit science journalism group operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that’s educated over 300 million people.

These were obviously mistakes. I would never intentionally come into contact with HT from the anode cap.

Oversizing switching gear is good to some point but instead of relay withstanding surges I would prefer breaker that would protect everything.

I actually also just added remote control to my pool, using a Sonoff 4CH pro. In my case, I have 3 devices I want to control. The pool pump itself, a water feature close to the pool, and the pool lighting. I also incorporated a flow rate sensor into the pump to make sure that the pump was not working too hard (as can happen when there is too much debris in the pool weir basket!). To drive the flow rate sensor, I tapped into the 5V supply before the 3.3V regulator, as the sensor was specced to run on 5V-24V, or thereabouts. I also inserted a level converter in between the flow rate signal and the Sonoff, even though it should be OK with 5V. I didn’t feel like taking chances.

It’s the peak rating. For constant loads, or anything that could be temporarily constant you need to de-rate.