• lime!@feddit.nu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    2 days ago

    we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.

    • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 days ago

      Okay -

      • 1, that’s awesome;
      • 2, for what purpose?
      • 3, is it normal for buildings to have 3-phase in split into different single-phase sections? That feels like you could get some iffy stuff from wildly different loads on the different phases.
      • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        16 hours ago

        First off, instead of using bullets and then manually enumerating then, try putting "1. " at the the start of every item in the list. Don’t increment the “1”.

        Around me the only homes without 3phases are older small apartments. Most houses have a 35A 3phase supply, although 63A may become the norm on account of EVs. It’s quite normal to have a 3 phased fuse where each phase is used for something different. Say a fuse box is used for lighting and outlets, but L1 is ground floor, L2 is upstairs and L3 is outdoors.

        BTW if you ever move into a house where someone has put outdoors on the same rcd as the rest of the house, then do yourself a favor and get a separate combo rcd/fuse for outdoors. When the rcd trips, it’s always the outdoor usage, and it sucks when all the lights go out, because a gasket died in an outdoor lamp.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        2 days ago

        we were recording the magnetic fields generated by a high-energy short circuit. we hung a mouse trap from one of the lines, with a lead going to one of the others, so that they fused together when it sprung.

        it is normal here, yes. larger appliances get three phases, and single-phase outlets are split between them as evenly as possible.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 days ago

        no, and yes. i’m not going into more detail for fear of doxxing myself but basically we wanted the waveforms generated by a high-voltage short circuit.

        later tests involved help from a power company and actual high-voltage lines.

        • trolololol@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          14 hours ago

          Sounds like a very cool job

          Those sparks must be epic, should give you the feeling of being a Nordic god or something

          The smoke from failed tests must be epic too

          • lime!@feddit.nu
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            13 hours ago

            it was, i miss it. surprisingly little smoke, but we did get some good arcs going.