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How To Understand Electricty In Simple Terms
When you start looking to find out about a subject you usually find yourself looking up the most technical forms of what you areinterested in. You read and read and then find yourself putting what you have learned into, hopefully, the simplest terms that you can deal with. This way of doing things also holds true for electrical circuitry or the path by which the negatively charged particles course through the wire conduits that bring people a service that we all know as 'electricity'. This is the 'stuff' that powers all of the items you use every single day.
In order for electricity to do its job, it must flow in a closed loop. This really means that it must begin at one end of the conduit (wire) and continue on to the other end of the wire. This pathway is called a circuit. The wire transfers the power (the beginning of the circuit), this beginning is the source of the electricity, and the light bulb, or the appliance, as an example, is the power user and then it has to go back to the power source.
In so doing, a complete electrical loop has occurred. The only way to stop this, other than not paying your electric bill, is to open the switch to your lamp, hair dryer, washing machine, stove or other electric appliances. By opening the switch, you have created a gap in the electrical loop. Therefore, the electrical loop is no longer continuous and the electricity is no longer flowing into the end user, such as your desk lamp, overhead light, chandelier, or anything else electrical.
To go a little deeper into this example, take the typical household lighting circuit. The current flows at 120 volts from a 'hot' (in this instance, 'hot' meaning electricity is running through it) bus bar. These are two thick black (full of electricity) service wires that come into the main box for your house, each carrying 120 volts from the electric meter.
This feeds the two "hot" electrical bus bars in the circuit breaker panel. These bus bars provide power to the circuits. The more bus bars you have in your circuit breaker will determine if you are able to provide 120 volt or 240 volt electricity to a circuit.
Single pole circuit breakers provide 120 volts and connect to just one 'hot' bus bar. Double pole circuit breakers provide 240 volts to a circuit and connect into both bus bars. The electrical current leaves the service panel through the black power wire and is on its way to your electrical device, be it a hair dryer or a washing machine, dryer, stove, oven, heater, even a telephone that you use that requires electricity.
So, when you turn on that switch, not only will your appliance work, you are actually closing a gap in an electrical pathway that began way before you even went to use it.
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