Episode 14 - Difference Of Potential (VOLTAGE)

what's up my dudes this is Destin sales or with an epidural this is Dustin Selzer with another episode of electrician you and today we're gonna talk a difference of potential a lot of people call it voltage but you're gonna hear that term if you start reading enough books and start really digging into this or if you're working around guys that really really understand what's going on they're gonna use the term difference of potential or potential difference so what voltage literally is is a difference of potential energy between two things that allows movement to happen so with a the most simple thing that I can think to to draw is a battery so think of a car battery right car battery you get a positive and you got a negative well inside of there you have a rod on one side and a rod on the other side each one of these rods are made of different materials there's all kinds of different ones but essentially you have a material that freely gives up electrons and you have a material that freely takes electrons so just the two differences of those materials there's a difference of potential energy when you have a dielectric in the middle here and you connect these two terminals you know you literally take a wire and connect them the current is going to flow through there very very rapidly kind of out of control rapidly and you'll probably burn the battery yet but there's there's such a potential difference of potential energy that movement is allowed to happen so every one of these bars is made of atoms inside the atoms there's a little electrons electrons move if you actually take like a magnet and you put it next to a piece of wire well inside that wire the electrons that are making up all of that copper are actually moving it's an invisible force because we can't actually see electrons but that's all electricity is is it's a movement of a kind of electrons just like wind through the air same thing so if you have a difference of potential you have two different things you can have a high and a low you know like lightning lightning once you have like a whole bunch of negative charges and you have a whole bunch of positive charges down low lightning will actually they will it will bridge the gap of the difference of potential energy that's existing if you just have like a regular day outside and the weather is pretty chill there's no build up of you know negative ions and positive ions there's not gonna be anywhere for this movement to happen so what a difference of potential energy does is it allows movement to happen same things say you've got a table and you've got a book sitting on the table well right now there's a difference of potential energy with this book once it's pushed will actually move down and hit the floor because this is a low potential and this is a high potential gravity instead of electricity same thing though gravity works off of a difference of potential so one last example I like to think of electricity like water most people do you start doing this long enough you'll sit and hear all kinds of water analogies with electricity so singing in a water slide we're just you know any slide but we're gonna go with water on this one you have a high you have a low well water is gonna flow down that thing pretty drastically right so say say that this is literally only this high this is perfect scale and I put a hose right here water is gonna flow down it you know you can put your finger in touch you can put your face in front of it and it wouldn't hurt you but say this is expanded greatly expanded linking Niagara Falls that water is gonna kill you same thing with electricity the more voltage that you have which is the more of a difference of potential energy the more dangerous that electricity is you know this is akin to like 12 volts but if you have 500,000 volts like Niagara Falls the shit's gonna kill you instantly so that's how you can think of voltage when you hear difference of potential just understand that there are certain things an electrical system that are at the same potential and there are things that are at a different potential someone you have a multimeter you know you've got your you've got one red lead a little spike on it and you've got one black lead a little spike on it they do that because they're trying you're trying to find two different potentials a positive and a negative or hot in a neutral or hot another hot so you know if you have one hot wire that comes in and another wire that comes in you're probably gonna have 208 volts or you're gonna have 240 volts you're gonna have such a difference of potential and it's able to read how strong of a push of difference of what the different or what the difference in this potential to this potential is and that's why you'll get a reading of 240 volts and that sine wave is constantly moving up and down so this this meter actually averages and finds what the average number it's kind of a nominal number when people say 240 it's not actually 240 it's gonna be like 243 year 237 or and when people say 110 or 120 it's that's just a nominal voltage that's terminology that we use but when you test at every single house and every building that you're gonna be working at and get 125 volts from hot to ground we're gonna get 115 or under an 18 you know it changes everywhere because every power system or every distribution of power is going to be different but it's all like relatively the same so anyways again potential difference of potential now what happens if we're in a panel and in that panel we take one side and the other side you know like every single panel you're gonna have probably black circuits and red circuits if you're in America right and these are all gonna be labeled like 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 so if you were to read between black and red say that you know we've got circuit - we've got circuit for well between these two if you're gonna read those wires you're gonna get 240 volts because inside this panel you have one hot that's coming in and you have another hot that's coming in that's how you you're bringing 240 volts into this panel and each one of these phases each black phase is going to have you know one potential in each red phase is gonna have a different potential and even when you look over at the ground you know you've got ground down here ground is at a completely different potential than either one of these huts and neutral is supposed to be relatively the same you don't want to have a difference in potential between your neutral and your ground you don't ever want to read voltage between your children you always want those to be at the same potential which is why we bond them out of service so anyways what would happen if we took and instead of pulling off of circuit four say we pull off of circuit two in circuit six two black circuits well again this one big black wire that's coming into this panel is touching every single one of these black phases same thing with the red that's this big red wire is the same potential it's touching every one of these red wires so when you have one black that you're testing and another black that you're testing it doesn't matter if you test from two to ten or two to fourteen as if you're testing black to black you're gonna get zero volts on this meter why is that well again those wires are the same thing they're all the same wire essentially they're just in different spots but they all have the same potential there all at the same hi they're not on two different highs or they're not ones high ones low but if you were to test any one of these blacks to ground you'll get 120 volts unless there's something wrong you should only get a hundred and twenty volts unless you're in a high voltage situation where you might get 277 volts but between this red and ground you should be eating a hundred twenty between this red and this neutral or between the black and neutral it should still only be 120 volts and that's why between any two hots you're gonna get 240 because up in a transformer I know I'm going way off the rails and giving you homework more information you're probably bargaining for it but okay so up in a transformer you're gonna have basically a big coil of wire so between here and here we're gonna have 240 volts it's more complicated than this this is just kind of layman understanding of how this works you're gonna have a coil of wire it's the difference in potential between this side of this coil and that side of this coil gives us 240 volts of potential energy because this thing is actually like a crazy winding of just like tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of wire and what happens is like from one side of that like crazy crazy crazy coil to the other side because of all of that coiling it actually slows electricity down it actually makes a difference of potential between it creates a right and a left or a high and a low anyways so how a neutral works this is the bizarre nobody really understands how neutral works neutral you just gonna cut this in half you have another half you tap it you literally make a connection right here and send this down so that between this part of the coil and this part of the coil you have 120 volts and between this part and this part you have 120 does that make sense if you have a whole coil that's 240 and you test the potential between here and here it should be half if you test between here and here it should be 1/4 1/2 3/4 full so that's how we get a hundred and twenty volts from a transformer up there we're sending one hot down to the house and another hot down to the house and somewhere up in that transformer they're tapping in the dead center of that coil and they're giving us a neutral and that's usually the same point when they big round each one of the poles too so the ground in the neutral are at the same potential even at the transformer that ground is a different ground than the ground that we have our grounding electrode conductor our equipment ground at our panels but it's exam it's just illustrating that ground and neutral should always be at the same potential I think that's it I think that covers everything that I want to talk about with difference of potentials so when you talk about voltage now understand that how voltage works how a movement of current through a wire happens is because somewhere had a Tillett II company somewhere somewhere at a dam locally or you know a coal plant or something somewhere these big generators are creating a difference of potential and they're sending the difference out potential out on different wires and you're able to do a hell of a lot if you connect those two wires you're gonna send a shitload of current through at one time really as electricians and electrical engineers and electronics guys like anybody that's dealing with electricity what we're really doing is we're trying to slow electricity down and control it so it's at a manageable workable level once you slow electricity down and throw some resistance in its way and make it have to slow down it's usable you know we can it can be in a light wall without a light bulb exploding you know they put an argon gas in there and they put a little tiny filament and that little filament has tons and tons and tons of little coils in it so it's like an obstacle course essentially that that current has to go through so it slows it down so much that the filament starts glowing and it's in a controllable level that's how electricity is isn't used otherwise if you just touched the two power lines together mm you'd have a huge explosion because it would make all of those electrons fly through that circuits so damn fast that it would just start welding everything together and just melting everything around it let's just these powerful man it's very powerful that is what a short-circuit is so short circuit you know you've got wire that comes out we'll say that this is AC electricity and say that we've got some load here I don't know we'll just call it a flash or a a light bulb so if you run a wire to a light bulb on the neutral side and you have one on the hot side this load is again like an obstacle course it's it's it's a resistance literally it's called resistance it's a resistive load that that current has to go through so it's like going fast and all of a sudden it just has something that it has to go through it's like you know trying to run through mud all of a sudden just slow the current down but if you were to connect this wire and this wire you'd have a short-circuit and right then you would have an immense amount of current an immense amount of energy for flying through the circuit uninhibited and that's dangerous it's super super dangerous so that's why short circuits we have to put you know breakers and panels and that's why we put fuses in cars and that's why you know we we try to protect from short circuits happening because you know short circuits can create mark flashes they can destroy equipment you know they can burn things up they can really hurt a lot of things so just think of your job like that you're like a fireman holding this hose and letting us crazy force come you know come out of you and you know we're just turning the valve and trying to like control how much voltage goes to certain things and how much resistance do we have to put in a circuit to be able to slow this current down so that it's at a usable level and how much amperage is a certain circuit drawing you know how much you know what size wire do we have to put so that we can responsibly like aim that that current somewhere without the wire burning up and because it's too small wire or whatever but that's pretty much the gist of it so anyways way off my tangents sorry a little bit an extra info there but difference in potential learn that term study up on that term go into some forums and check some electrician talk forums Mike Holt forums just you know try to dig into difference of potential a little bit and see see what you learn about it cuz it's a very important term to know as an electrician so I hope that was easy to understand it was way confusing and off tangent but deal with it I love you guys and I'll see you in the next episode [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 76,595

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, apprentice, journeyman, master, electrical vlog, electrician vlog, electrical videos, electrician videos, electrical show, electrician show, electrician u, dustin stelzer, journey 2 master, Voltage, Difference of Potential, Potential Energy, Potential, what is voltage, what is difference of potential, how does voltage work, how current moves, how does current move, voltage explained, difference of potential explained

Id: Mz0dqBA-6HE

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018