Short #84 - Power Passing vs. Consuming

HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs

Bryan Orr

Careers, Business, Self-improvement, Education

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this short podcast, Bryan briefly explains why we use a voltmeter to measure "voltage drop" across loads and switches. He also covers some of the differences between passing and consuming power.

Many of us are naturals at using voltmeters already. Voltmeters have two leads, and those exist to measure the difference or potential between them. Voltage is a reference to what is going on between the leads; whenever resistance exists, we have a voltage drop. Resistance can sometimes be designed or undesigned.

When we think about power passing and consuming, we should note that "consuming" refers to turning energy from a usable form to an unusable one. Stored energy becomes potential energy when it needs to do work. Power consuming results in work; a coil in a contactor or a filament in a lightbulb is a load (the load has resistance). On the other hand, power-passing components do not have resistance, and the charges merely move. We must keep the intended resistance in mind whenever we measure the voltage of energized components; resistance will impact the voltage drop.

If you have a high-limit furnace safety, you will want to measure the voltage drop across the limit. There should NOT be a voltage drop across it because it is a power-passing component; there should be no resistance. Of course, you must determine if there is an energy potential present in the first place. Conversely, you SHOULD see a voltage drop when measuring the potential across a heater or fan motor.

Overall, wires and switches are power passing components that should not have voltage drops across them. Heaters, compressors, and fan motors are all loads that "consume" power.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is the HVAC School podcast and last time I checked my name is Brian and last time I checked this is the
0:09.3	podcast that you turn to if you want to learn something that you might have forgotten along the way or
0:14.9	learn something you forgot to know in the first place. And today's topic is something that is near and dear to my heart,
0:20.4	which is the idea of using a volt meter effectively and the difference
0:24.2	between power passing and we're going to say power consuming even though I don't really
0:28.5	like that word but it's the word that's typically used in the trade so we're
0:31.3	going to talk about that we're going to talk about the use of a volt meter just for a few minutes we're not going to cover it soup to nuts but just a
0:36.2	good reminder especially since a lot of you who listen may struggle with it but before we do
0:41.2	that let's thank our sponsors and our sponsors
0:43.1	our carrier and carrier.com. Speed clean and speed clean.com I've talked a lot about
0:49.0	speed clean lately and they make a lot of really great equipment, mechanical equipment for cleaning,
0:54.4	air conditioning, refrigeration systems effectively.
0:57.1	There's steam cleaner, coil shot, coil jet, many different products and you can take a look at them
1:02.0	by going to truetech tools.com the offer code get school to works there for those products.
1:07.0	So if you're in the market for some better solutions for cleaning take a look there and if you're in the market for some great chemicals maybe you
1:14.5	want something that's safer more effective for the industry maybe you want
1:18.5	something that's safer maybe you want something that's more effective maybe you
1:22.2	just want to partner with a company that cares about
1:24.0	the industry and you want to do good by the industry by buying from American companies that
1:28.0	really care about reinvesting. Well then refrigeration technologies is your company. They make
1:32.0	Viper, they make Viper, they make
1:33.2	Nylog, they make Big Blue, probably products you've used in the past, but I
	...

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